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October 04, 2007
Internet runtime environments
Marc Andreessen has a great post on internet platforms where he points out that Salesforce.com is a level 3 platform (Thanks to Adam Gross for pointing this out).
Here is Marc's terminology:
Level 1 is an Access API.
Level 2 is a Plug-In API.
Level 3 is an Internent Runtime Environment.
Level 2 is Facebook. Here is his description of Salesforce's platform:
Second, in a completely different domain, Salesforce.com is also taking a Level 3 platform approach -- Salesforce now provides quite sophisticated ways for users and developers to create and upload code and program the Salesforce platform from a browser.
Salesforce provides a Level 3 platform both because it lets users easily customize Salesforce to do whatever they need, and also because it definitively trumps the criticism they historically got from packaged software vendors like Siebel who accused Salesforce of not being as adaptable as a piece of software you install on your own servers.
You probably don't see this in action much -- unless you're a Salesforce user -- but they're doing really interesting work in this area and getting great results.
Posted by Chris at October 4, 2007 10:31 PM