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The $65/month lie
I don’t mean to cast aspersions on Salesforce.com when I say the above. But when listening to Ray Lane’s keynote at Software 2006, he repeated this idea of a single employee shelling out $65 out of pocket to be able to start using something valuable like Salesforce.
Except, that’s not possible. The $65/month advertised is 8.25% of the price you actually have to pay on day one: $780, which gets you the use for the year. So it’s not like you can try it for a couple of months for $130 and walk away. SugarCRM advertises their price point as being even lower, but if you want to dip your toe in the water with their hosted edition, shell out a minimum of $2000 for five seats for one year.
These are still not gigantic dollars from an organizational perspective, but they put the lie to the idea that many of these services can be picked up individually, outside of the organization’s decision structure.
But even this may just be a point about where we are now, while we might still be headed in the direction Lane described. After all, $2000 for five seats is an easier way to get started than $200000 for five hundred, which is where the market was just a few years ago.
But let’s not confuse what’s coming with what’s here - that temporal distinction is what separates an impractical visionary from an entrepreneur.