Toyota and Salesforce.com team up for in-car social networking service
It's perhaps not the most likely of companies to go into the social networking game, but Japanese car manufacturer Toyota has announced it's launching a social networking service of its very own.
Context & Ripple Effects
Toyota is best known for manufacturing, not media, so launching its own social networking service — with Salesforce.com supplying the cloud backend — marks the automaker's first public step toward treating the car's dashboard as a software surface rather than a sealed cockpit.
For Salesforce.com, the deal extends a consumer-adjacent expansion that began when it bought Heroku for roughly $212 million in December 2010 and earlier made its cloud interoperate with Facebook's and Amazon's clouds: Chatter-style social infrastructure moving from sales teams into embedded products.
First-order effects
- Toyota owners gain an in-car social layer built on Salesforce.com's platform, giving both companies a live testbed for social features inside a moving vehicle.
- Salesforce.com adds an automotive logo to a client roster previously dominated by enterprise CRM buyers, proving its platform can power consumer-facing products.
Second-order effects
- Rival automakers now face pressure to answer with their own connectivity partnerships, since a branded social service turns infotainment from a supplier-sourced commodity into a differentiation battleground.
- Cloud software vendors gain a new vertical: if Toyota will embed a social network at the factory level, other manufacturers become prospective customers for the same hosted stack.
Third-order effects
- If the partnership holds, the pattern points toward vehicles as subscription-bearing platforms — hardware makers recurring revenue from software services layered on top of the sale, with cloud providers as the quiet infrastructure winners.
- It also foreshadows consolidation of the connected-car stack around a few large platform vendors rather than bespoke in-house systems at each manufacturer, though whether drivers want to socialize from the driver's seat remains genuinely untested.
The trend: Automakers are beginning to partner with cloud software firms to convert the car from a closed machine into a service-delivery platform, with 2011 marking the first wave of these alliances.