I love it when I hear people say they’re coming to market with "a light version of salesforce.com," or some other similar proposition. I say that because I welcome anything that makes more people more familiar with the convenience and capability of On Demand applications — and because I’d rather compete against a self-described "light" version of what we do than against people’s misconceptions about what we don’t do.

It’s also helpful to have other On Demand service providers walk around us, estimate the cost of being us, and say that they just don’t aspire to that level of enterprise-class robustness. It validates our position that being an enterprise SaaS provider requires a whole lot more than exposing application function through a Web services API; it also encourages enterprise IT buyers to look at the big-picture value of the reliability of function and the world-class data protection that we provide, not only on our own behalf but also as part of what they get from our AppExchange partners.

Pickup trucks, and for that matter 18-wheelers, aren’t threatened by the existence of motorcycles. The latter get better mileage and park in a smaller space, but there are jobs that they just don’t do — and all types of motor vehicle benefit from shared infrastructure, with all kinds of driver able to find a road that goes to their destination and fuel to make the trip.

The bigger the On Demand world gets, the more people will realize that there are different ways to take different trips and carry different loads within that space. In the meantime, we’ll keep on trucking.