Went to DreamForce last week for a couple of days.  My first time.  I’m always intrigued by companies that build of an ecosystem of contributors, and had wanted to see this event for that reason.

I was very pleasantly surprised.  I think of Salesforce itself as a Web 1.0 application (or maybe 0.9).  It was a world-beater when it took down Siebel, but the whole world of web applications has moved forward quite a bit.  As Salesforce admin at Valhalla Partners, I have a heck of a time getting people to log their deals (we use it to track deal flow), and at least part of it is the clunky interface.  Not being able to see your subtask and your context at the same time is a huge liability of the Web 1.0 world (and only partially cured in Web 2.0 btw).

But the ecosystem around Salesforce is really vigorous.  There’s a lot of app work with first-rate UX.  And, if you think about it, Salesforce may be the #1 Web platform for databases about people and people-oriented workflow.  Certainly Microsoft Dynamics and Google apps can’t touch it.

I don’t know if we’ll find investable opportunities around this ecosystem, but I’ll give it a serious look.

Let me know if there’s anything you see that could use our capital…