Link: Salesforce.com’s Balancing Act.
"Sooner or later every software company succumbs to the law of gravity that pulls down its pace of growth as it swells in size. Case in point: Revenue at Salesforce.com (CRM), the maker of software that helps corporations manage customer relationships, is expected to grow 45% this year, compared with 60% growth in 2006 and 76% in 2005. Like its peers, Salesforce.com will try to buck the trend by mining new areas, but it needs to do so without treading on the toes of the companies that build add-ons to its products that boost its own sales."
I wonder how much of the slowdown in Salesforce.com’s growth is due to the growth of open source and/or more flexible alternatives like SugarCRM. I’ve talked to a few companies that were considering Salesforce, but decided against it when they realized how locked into the platform they were going to become.