Abe and I went to Salesforce.com’s Tour de Force in Santa Clara yesterday.  It was an extravagant affair.  Nice Hyatt Regency accommodations and conference rooms, refreshments throughout the day, deli lunch, and plenty of tech folks filling out the rooms and halls.  We walked away with a couple “cook books”, a free Force.com shirt, and hoping we won the iPhone contest.

Really interesting and compelling stuff.  Benioff gave the keynote (which was 2 hours), and preached the platform-as-a-service model.  Why spend money, time, and stress on infrastructure?  All that overhead investment causes good products to take an extra couple years to get out of the gate.  Anyway, I had already drunk the kool-aid a while ago, so he was preaching to the choir as far as I was concerned.

He gave his version of web history: Web 1.0 gave users access to things they wanted.  Think eBay, Amazon, and other retailers.  Web 2.0 gave users the ability to publish their own content.  And Web 3.0, he suggested, gives users the ability to develop their own products, leaving all that infrastructure investment to the folks who’ve already done the hard work.  Hence: Force.com.

Got some more thoughts about Force.com and VisualForce in particular, seeing as how we’re a design team after all.  More on that later.