Dreamforce Europe 08: Post-keynote Q&A conference

After the general opening session, Marc Benioff has exposed himself to the questions of the press and analysts. I succeded on posing 2 questions, among the more than 30 that I prepared... probably I exagerated... In any case some of the questions coming from my colleagues were very interesting and covered many aspects I was interested in as well.
In this exclusive video you can follow the interaction with Marc Benioff and his answers to the press. The first touched arguments have been cloud computing and the Salesforce.com position on this, difference in audience between the US and the European events, China's future CRM evolution, Force.com objectives and performance, etc.
One example of interesting question has been about the competition between Salesforce.com and Google, although the answer was quite short.

My first question was based on the observation that the new level of IT possibilities offered by the on-demand concept, the cloud computing architecture and the AppExchange community, offers a tremendous availability of software functionalities to all the customers. This broadening of new IT features is also the trend of every CRM software vendor that, based on years of projects implementations (and failures as well), includes new functionalities on their software often basing on custom solutions that the customers implemented themselves in order to overcome the functional limitations of the chosen package. If this is fair or not, I think it's a matter of the customers, after the millions of euros or dollars spent on these.
Salesforce in any case is bringing this concept to the extreme, giving it also a new foundation, a precise identity on which basing an entire new trend. In this way the entire movement is justified, as potentially accesible and available to everyone.
So I started from the idea that CRM is an acronym that was created by Tom Siebel, but slowly moved into a more "business" oriented movement, into a "Journey".
Is it all then? it's IT just the supporting application of the CRM processes and it cannot make anymore the difference in terms of solutions in the competition among organizations for the acquisition and retainance of customers?

My second question was more focused on the future of Salesforce.com: born as a CRM software solution provider (even if on-demand, as a SaaS), has now moved to the Platform as a Service concept, opening its Force.com platform to its customers for the development of new applications. Is so Saleforce.com still interested in developing solutions of its own, or it's more interested now in the platform and looking at what the clients and partners are going to implement with their framework?
Benioff explained that a lot of applications on the AppExchange servers are by Salesforce.com, but nothing was mentioned about some new brand ideas for a new killer application.
My sensation is that the IT market is somehow saturating and the public is not yet aware of the difference between a classic software and its programming languages and their meta layers, the meta-langauges.
The possibilites offered by salesforce.com in fact rely on a higher conceptual definition, enabling users to customize their applications in a simpler way. Without a definition of an M2 level (referring to the 3 layer OMG framework in relation to the UML), this would not have been possible. The Apex code works at this level... more about this will be published on a new post.