The Applicator

This is one of what I hope is a long series of posts on what’s wrong with cloud computing. (The more cloud computing grows, the more things there will be wrong with it.)

OK, so this morning I get an e-mail from Xactly, a sales compensation software company closely allied with Salesforce. It’s a hosted, oops, cloud application, a fixture on the AppExchange, which at least theoretically lets salespeople who use Salesforce figure out what their compensation is going to be if they ever get one of those sales.

Steve Cakebread, part owner of Cakebread Cellars and, oh yes, for many years CFO at Salesforce is giving a seminar on how to sell to the CFO. The seminar is sponsored by Xactly of which, not coincidentally, Cakebread is now the CFO.

The wine is quite good. I’ve had it at many of those lavish events for analysts that Salesforce used to sponsor back in the days now gone. But of course it was before noon when I got this e-mail, so I didn’t think too much about the wine.

So I signed up, or tried to. You see, while Xactly may be on the AppExchange, they don’t use Force.com as a platform, they have their own product which is hosted by OpSource, another long-time Salesforce partner and AppExchange stalwart that has a particular appeal to AppExchange partners because they help people through the process of joining the AppExchange.

The e-mail comes from Xactly, but actually Xactly is using the events software from OpSource, so when you register, you register at a site with an OpSource URL.

So when you get to the registration site, you can see labels, like Name, E-mail, etc., but you can’t actually see any fields to put your name in. This is probably due to the fact that OpSource (or whoever wrote this registration page) actually doesn’t believe in providing products that work correctly on Firefox, another cloud computing provider.

Where is that wine?

To register, I have to find the fields by hitting the Submit button, which gives me an error message, saying I haven’t filled out a field, and then I can kind of guess where to put the cursor, and at the end, my name is David Dobrin Dobrin, because I put David Dobrin in what I thought was the Name field, but was actually the First Name field and then had to poke my way around until I could find the Last Name field and put my last name in again.

Is it noon, yet?

So I’m registered, yay, but I can’t actually remember when it is, so there’s a little button that says, “If you’d like to sign up with Adobe Connect, you’ll get an e-mail with an item for your Outlook calendar.” I cringe a little because Outlook calendar items don’t integrate very well with the Mail app from Apple, but OK. So I hit the button. I am now hooked up with Adobe Connect (although it’s still an OpSource URL), and again, I am asked for my registration information. So do I have to register again or not? You tell me. I don’t know.

Except that there’s another button that says, “If you’ve already registered with us, click here.” Now who is “Us?” OpSource? Adobe Connect? Xactly? Salesforce? Cakebread Cellars? I’m assuming “us” means “the seminar you just signed up for, dummy,” so I click the button. Up come a username and password field. For whom? OpSource? Adobe? Crud, I wonder if my old username and password for that meeting software that Adobe bought years ago still works. What was it? I can’t remember.

Guys. Give me a break. If I want to sign up for your seminar, I don’t want to have to establish/remember relationships with three other cloud computing companies. The only other company I even want to know about is Cakebread Cellars. If you don’t actually believe in, want to participate in, or know anything about universal identifiers as a necessary lubricant in the cloud, then at least have the good taste not to inflict all your relationships on me.

In cloud computing, you always do a lot of function shifting onto your partners. But if that simply becomes cost-shifting onto your customer, you and cloud computing have failed.

And when that happens, I have a ready alternative. Instead of dealing with Cakebread CFO, I deal with Cakebread Cellars. Have some wine.