Let the idiocy begin. "On the surface, the event features a continuation of the alliance between Salesforce and Google’s Apps services. Behind the scenes, this

Let the idiocy begin. "On the surface, the event features a continuation of the alliance between Salesforce and Google’s Apps services. Behind the scenes, this is an old fashioned land grab for developers, trying to pry them off Visual Studio and .Net and into the benefits of collaborative on demand services." Salesforce's platform competes with .NET? How? Salesforce provides business applications which interoperates with third-party applications. .NET is a Windows-based development platform -- it includes desktop, graphics, and all manner of things that have absolutely nothing to do with ASP.NET, which is a general platform for making any kind of web application you want. You know, a lot of .NET development consists of assloads of SQL Server stored procedures along with enough C# wrapper code to hook the database up to a web page. The database is fucking God in .NET land -- the interface is an afterthought. Microsoft's tools encourage this by being extremely data/model-oriented. There is no migration path from .NET to Salesforce, except "let's throw away all our code, chuck all our valuable relational data, and instead use a precanned web-based suite with an API we can develop against in ways preapproved by a for-profit enterprise who now has us by the balls." Note that I have not even bothered to dignify the retarded utterance that Salesforce is somehow comparable to Visual Studio, a desktop IDE, with a response. If instead Gillmor meant to compare Salesforce to all of Microsoft's "Live" services that no one really cares about or uses (awful design, awful marketing, awful products), he should get his product families right.