Salesforce debuts Do.com, a smart social productivity app for small teams
Salesforce has revealed a new web-based application called Do.com that combines task management with social features to create a smart way to get things done on your own and in groups.
Context & Ripple Effects
Do.com is the latest step in Salesforce's multi-year push to make 'social' a feature of every layer of enterprise software, not just CRM. In March 2011 it shipped Service Cloud 3 with Chatter plus Facebook and Twitter integrations, and back in 2007 it experimented with community input via its Digg-style ideas forum — so the company has been testing how social mechanics travel across product lines for years.
What changes with Do.com is the target: instead of bolting social onto service agents or developer communities, Salesforce is pointing it at small teams' everyday task lists, a market owned by lightweight standalone tools rather than enterprise suites. Its December 2010 acquisition of contact-manager startup Etacts already signaled an appetite for small-scale productivity assets.
First-order effects
- Salesforce now competes directly with standalone task-management and to-do apps for small teams, bringing Chatter-style social features and an enterprise vendor's balance sheet into a segment built on cheap, simple tools.
- Small teams get a free-or-cheap on-ramp into the Salesforce ecosystem that does not require buying CRM seats first.
Second-order effects
- Standalone productivity startups must answer a bundled rival — either deepen their own social/collaboration features or differentiate on focus and price against a vendor that can subsidize the category.
- For Salesforce, Do.com functions as a top-of-funnel asset: teams that adopt it for tasks become candidates for Chatter and eventually paid Force.com work, extending the land-and-expand motion below its traditional buyer.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise platform vendors will keep shipping lightweight, freemium productivity apps as acquisition surfaces, structurally squeezing independent point-tool makers between free bundles and full suites.
- The move also reinforces the convergence of consumer-style simplicity with enterprise distribution — the same playbook visible in Salesforce's earlier social experiments, now applied to the smallest unit of work, the team task list.
The trend: Enterprise software vendors are unbundling lightweight social productivity apps aimed at small teams as low-cost entry points into their broader platforms.