Friday, January 07, 2011

A refreshingly honest acquisition message

Image representing Salesforce as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase
Some of you may have heard of DimDim - a free alternative to WebEx and GoToMeeting type web conference services. I have used it myself, as it made sense for the limited screen sharing requirements I had. Well, DimDim has announced that it will be acquired by Salesforce.com [CRM], in a surprisingly blunt email message sent out yesterday:

Dear Customer:
Dimdim has been acquired by salesforce.com.Your free Dimdim account will remain active until March 15, 2011. After that date, you will no longer be able to access your free Dimdim account.
Please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for additional information.
We appreciate your understanding, and we thank you!
I understand that free is free and therefore nobody really has any obligations either way. It is kind of refreshing to not hear the regular corporate language that DimDim's customers are the most important thing, and that everybody will be embraced and adored so maybe a few more people will be signed up into the Salesforce services. Salesforce obviously wants the on-screen collaboration technology to accompany its Chatter capabilities, not the probably fairly minimal paid subscriber-base that DimDim has acquired.

To DimDim - thanks for your free service. It has been useful and helped set expectations at WebEx that no small business is going to pay $30 a month for something they use very occasionally. Good luck making the technology an integral part of the Salesforce collaboration set. And even better, thanks for not blowing smoke and telling us customers how wonderful we are, when we all know that we were just a tool to you guys making some big money on an acquisition! 

A post from the Improving It blog
Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

1 comment:

Yuval said...

Hi,

ShowDocument.com is an app-based Web Meetings platform that lets people
meet anytime, anywhere. ShowDocument is a 100% SaaS platform with a high
level of synchronization. It is very easy to use and it has great
capabilities such as ability to share documents, images and videos;
whiteboard; co-editing; screen share; chat translation to name a few.

We invite ALL DimDim's users as well as others to try it for FREE!


We look forward to having you.

Yuval