I haven't used the SalesForce.com solution yet, but I was shocked to meet someone the other day who was part of a company that only builds plug-ins and extensions to Sales Force. They have clearly created an interaction operating system that sits in distributed fashion on the web. Sales Force has the model that will come to dominate the future of web technology - software as a service, modular integration and true ease of use.

The only thing that concerns me about Sales Force, and this needs to be taken with a grain of salt, because I have not had the chance to work with their service yet, is their focus on designing tools to facilitate an existing and tightly defined process. Web Office technology is about two things, as Richard MacManus has so succinctly put it: read & write. In other words, Web Office technology has the potential to provide everyone in an organization with the tools to work directly and efficiently with everyone else in the organization. That's an impressive idea, and a big idea. It means both being about to communicate and being able to build little ad hoc processes for a given project. To build a true Web Office eco-system, Sales Force will need to make sure they focus as much of building tools to facilitate creation (the write part) as they do now on building tools to facilitate the consumption of content and the use of pre-defined processes (the read part).

That being said, SalesForce.com's success speaks for itself. The big thing that all similar Web Office Technology companies can learn from Sales Force is simple - figure out how to give your tool an open API. Even if you can't initially work out how you are going to generate revenue, make that open API. As soon as you create the open API, people will be creating Google Maps style mash-ups and Greasemonkey scripts that integrate with your service. When that happens, you have something big.