Salesforce and Google ally -- for now

Hamlet: Act I, Scene V         Ghost     Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,     With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, --     O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power     So to seduce! -- won to his shameful lust     The will of my most seeming-virtuo

Hamlet: Act I, Scene V

        Ghost
    Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
    With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, --
    O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
    So to seduce! -- won to his shameful lust
    The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen:
    O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!

I'm not sure who will be the queen and who will be the ghost as an outcome of the "global strategic alliance" between Google and Salesforce announced this week, but I do predict there will be one of each.

"O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!" says the ghost of Hamlet's father, and for reasons I will explain, this glorious -- er, I mean, global -- announcement of a close relationship between Google and Salesforce reminds me of that very scene in Act I.

In the announcement, Kraig Swensrud, vice president of applications at Salesforce, described in detail the very tight integration between Salesforce's CRM app and Google's growing productivity suite.

O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power/So to seduce!
All is sweetness and light at the moment. If a salesperson equipped with the integrated apps puts a "to do" task in Salesforce, it will appear in the Google calendar entry. If two people are working on a presentation at the same time -- say, an art director changing the colors of the bars and a finance person changing the number of dollars in the bars in the graph -- both will see, in real time, the changes being made. Gmail messages will be automatically sent to leads or contacts in the proper component of Salesforce.

It is indeed quite an integration effort from both parties, due in large part because both companies have the same 100 percent Web- and multitenant-based architecture. On top of all that, next summer, the partnership will become even more integrated by giving customers a single bill that combines both companies' services.

However, my skeptical mind tells me the seeds of discontent are being sown alongside the integration. Because let's face it, both Mark Benioff and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are no fading flowers.

With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts
How, I ask, will both companies and their leaders be willing to compromise their portion of the partnership if at some later date the other decides it wants to upgrade its service in a way that is not immediately compatible with or beneficial to the other's application?