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Last Thursday afternoon, in response to a softball question from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the subject of the relationship of Google's proposed takeover of Motorola Mobility to the ongoing patent wars, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt cleverly avoided linking the two. In fact, he suggested that Google was more impressed by the company's phones and their engineers than with its patent portfolio. "We're actually very excited about the product line and so forth," Schmidt told Benioff. "To use the Motorola brand and product architecture, and the engineers and creative people - these guys invented the RAZR!"

For those who may have already forgotten, the RAZR was perhaps the last trendy, fashionable phone prior to the iPhone. Launched in 2004, it was the U.S.' top seller for nearly three years, but that fact didn't help Motorola very much financially. And as far as design was concerned, the product line was not without its defects. No, it's hard to believe that RAZR engineering was the key selling point for Schmidt and Google.

There are four major players in the customer relationship management market: SAP, Siebel, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com. Their market share differences are negligible. (This article is the counterpoint to an analysis by David Strom here.)

But this week, only one was behaving like it has the formula to dominate the market. Salesforce has the ingredients. It lacks the recipe.

No one denies any more the fact that Salesforce.com has become a platform. Some would go so far as to call it an ecosystem, but it may yet need to prove its mettle in that category. At issue: Can three established services in the same market carve out competitive presences for each other inside the Salesforce platform?

On one side of the arena is Citrix, an established brand with about $11.4 billion in market capitalization (Salesforce itself is already at $17.1 billion), and whose GoToAssist brand is already one of the world's most recognized. On another side is Assistly, which is based on an innovative system of automated "agents" that communicate with customers on a regular basis. And in the third corner is Angel Contact Center, which integrates call center support with business intelligence functions.

For a conference whose host boldly proclaims, "We live in the post-PC revolution," most of the innovations introduced by partners and third parties at this year's Dreamforce conference are probably best suited for viewing from your favorite PC Web browser.

One huge exception this week comes from Seesmic, which came to fame with its multi-channel social networking tool that became an ecosystem unto itself. This week at Dreamforce, Seesmic is demonstrating its prowess with correlating social data for business, with a CRM platform built on the Salesforce API that's custom-designed for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.

It may seem less of a shock to those who experience history as a constant, flowing stream, who perceive events as progressions rather than snapshots, who remember the recent, and then the distant, past by rewinding their memories past last week, last year, the year before, to eventually arrive at a different era. For anyone else who can instantly recall the power newspapers once held, walking out on your porch for your daily bottles of milk, and how refreshing a cold bottle of Coke could be on a sweaty summer Saturday, this photograph is like being flung mercilessly into a Ray Bradbury novel.

ReadWriteWeb presents exclusive embedded video of the Dreamforce 2011 conference in San Francisco, with running commentary by Scott Fulton. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff leads the festivities, and he's beginning by driving home the message that PCs have held users back the way Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Khadafi held back Egypt and Libya, respectively.

A new Salesforce database feature Benioff is announcing today enables data centers to store selected data locally without using it to populate the Salesforce database.

A marketing manager helping me to un-mix my metaphors once explained to me that, in terms of software, a "tool" becomes an "environment" when it collects too many tools. Salesforce.com is an example of a product that has clearly metamorphosed into an "environment," with this week's Dreamforce '11 conference in San Francisco devoting much of its space and time to tools that are integrating with Salesforce.

One prominent example is called Cloud Extend. Announced last April and officially launched this week by Active Endpoints, this tool endows Salesforce with workflow graphs called guidance trees, originally developed to assist in patient diagnosis, but with their sharp edges filed down to help agents maintain better customer relations.

When we had the chief scientist of Salesforce.com JP Rangaswami at our 2Way conference in New York earlier this summer, he spoke about how the gamification of apps will change the nature of work. And at the annual Dreamforce conference next week in San Francisco, you can see this happening with two of the finalists for their Appquest competition. Both IActionable's Engage and Bunchball's Nitro for Salesforce are work-orieneted games based on the Force.com platform.

President Bill Clinton discussed Wikileaks in a keynote speech at the Dreamforce conference today.

Clinton used the Wikileaks issue to illustrate the theme of his discussion, which centered on instability in the world.

"What you do not see is how many people were exposed," Clinton said about Wikileaks, referring to informants providing information about their native countries to the United States.

As a result, people may be killed and careers will be ruined, Clinton said.

It is the second day of Dreamforce, the annual conference for Salesforce.com users.

Today the news is all about Heroku, which has been acquired by Salesforce.com for $212 million.

We'll see what else is on tap as Marc Benioff takes the stage.