Tom Foremski suggests it might be...
...well, I hope not. I have complimented Marc Benioff before on breaking the industry mold. I hope he continues to and expands the company's functional footprint. I also rant about industry M&A not having shown much customer payback.
But if the company is up, I suspect Google, Microsoft (it would be pocket change compared to Yahoo!), may be even SAP would be interested, not just Oracle. At Microsoft and SAP, egos would be hurt as their own CRM 4.0 and BBD offerings take off but compared to the wide Oracle stable of applications, that would still be manageable.
Heck, even IBM and HP should be interested. Because like Yahoo! would teach Microsoft about infrastructure of cloud computing, salesforce.com could teach the big outsourcers a thing or two about next generation SLAs and price points.
If it happens, it better be at a whopping premium - because other than with Google (which would bring a separate set of business model issues), it would be one painful integration for the salesforce team. Rarely do pioneers integrate well with larger, more set companies in their sector.
