Recently (as noted in the above referenced post by Dan Farber) he said: “We will destroy Oracle and SAP because they won’t be able to respond to the innovation we are about to unleash.”

Personally, I don’t see APEX as a formidable innovation capable of destroying Oracle and SAP. Though I may be wrong, and Salesforce may also have a number of other “tricks up their sleeve” so to speak.

I took his quote about maintaining dual products with Apex as another bold statement. I think it is more wishful thinking on his part. For his statement to be considered reasonable, one would have to assume that APEX will one day become the platform of choice for end-users. So much so that end-users would come to a company like Success Factors, and say…”We know you have an awesome on-demand product, but we love APEX for some reason, and we won’t subscribe to your app unless it runs on APEX.”

It’s probably not fair for me to reply here because we talk about this every day, all day… but I’d like to extend your example and reframe the question:

If your understanding is correct, and Marc Benioff proposes that developers fork their projects and maintain an Apex codebase, then let’s assume that other platform players will follow in his footsteps. After all, the only safe platform is a “walled garden” right now, right? Well, then my question becomes… what makes developers interested in jumping on a platform? This is the cannibilization notion we talk about all the time in SaaS. In order to pursue SaaS, you (the developer) must give up a piece of your core competency to join one of these platform ecosystems. What is the most important part of that decision on the developer’s part? Is it just a matter of “My CTO told me to do it, so I’ll start writing Apex code too.” Is maintaining, say, .NET code AND Apex code for the same product an issue in anybody’s eyes?

I’m interested too.