Not satisfied with customer relationship management and related functions, Salesforce.com is now trying to be a generic
platform provider (called force.com) for applications. In this version, they have removed a previous limitation and have created a toolkit that will allow developers to build customized user interfaces to their programs. As a platform provider, their strategy is to create value by attracting more customers and developers to their platform. If they were not able to do this for CRM, how can they accomplish this for generic applications? Why would developers want to launch unrelated (to CRM) applications on this platform? The second (and related) challenge is in appropriating value. I guess their plan is to charge users for accessing their platform like an operating system provider. Is this a case of a packaged software provider being too ambitious?