The Gillmor Gang traveled to Moscone Center for a special live edition at Dreamforce 2010. Salesforce.com’s premier conference has ballooned to more than 30,000 registered attendees, and now covers Moscone North, South, and West venues. Regular Gang member and Cloudblogger John Taschek and analyst and ZDNet columnist Phil Wainewright held down the enterprise perspective, joined by new Salesforce chief scientist JP Rangaswami and Forbes associate editor Victoria Barret.
Barret focused her recent cover story on Marc Benioff, and particularly the use of Salesforce Chatter as a tool to address the Facebook/Twitter wave and its impact on the culture of business in the realtime age. She had watched the previous day’s keynote from him, finding herself surprised it was almost better to mix video and realtime streams from attendees and those watching on the Net.
The Gang covered topics including the Death of Office at the hands of realtime streams and the end of email (couldn’t happen soon enough). We could barely hear each other over the din of the Expo behind us, which oddly mirrored the siloing that goes on between document-centric productivity applications, and where cc really stands for ass-cover as Rangaswami put it. Those who question the value of realtime collaboration have only to wait for the next Exchange server meltdown.
