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Alas, everything I wrote is true, it exactly happened the way I describe in my post. To be honest, I haven't seen a platform with as myopic a strategy as Salesforce, not from Microsoft, not from Google, not from Facebook, not by a long shot, so their situation is a bit unique.

In fact, several months after those events happened, there were people on their team who were uncomfortable with Benioff's stance. They tried to get him to change his mind, to no avail - a second set of interactions happened where one of their execs tried to get us in to Force.com, but he was vetoed by Benioff himself much to his disappointment and frustration (he ended up leaving Salesforce, so he won't be impacted when I say this). It was only after all that happened that I decided to go public with this.

We still stand ready to integrate our suite, just as we do with Facebook, with Google single sign-on and so on. The key question stands: would they let Zoho play in their ecosystem? If not what is the meaning of being "open"?

After all, Benioff compares Salesforce's "openness" with Microsoft, but consider the contrast. AdventNet, the parent company of Zoho, sells most of its software on the Windows platform (like most software companies do, no surprise there). We didn't have to seek permission from Microsoft to create applications on Windows. I don't know the terms, but I bet Microsoft would let us play on the Azure cloud platform, because they know a thing or two about empowering third party developers. Google lets us offer their users the option to sign-in to Zoho using their Google ID. Google lets us integrate Gears for the offline version - they even gave us publicity when we finished the integration. Google APIs are open to any and all vendors, including Zoho, on equal terms.