Is Salesforce planning to offer an online operating system next?

While the big news at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce 2007 user conference in San Francisco was leaked a week early, CEO Marc Benioff added more details and said something either inadvertently or on purpose that hints at an even bigger role for Visualforce and its platform-as-a-service technology. The unveiling of Visualforce was the major announcement for the user conference because it represents yet another sig

While the big news at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce 2007 user conference in San Francisco was leaked a week early, CEO Marc Benioff added more details and said something either inadvertently or on purpose that hints at an even bigger role for Visualforce and its platform-as-a-service technology.

The unveiling of Visualforce was the major announcement for the user conference because it represents yet another significant step forward in creating what Benioff calls a Platform-as-a-Service.

Visualforce adds the user interface as a service to Salesforce's other platform components: infrastructure and security, database services, integration services, logic services, and application services, now called in its entirety, Force.com

Benioff compared Force.com to other well-entrenched development platforms, Java and .Net in particular.

Although he didn't state it outright, there was a hint during his address of something more. What, it seems to me, Benioff hinted at was that Visualforce combined with all the other platform components beneath it could in fact rival Microsoft Windows, at least as a quasi-operating system.

This occurred when Benioff ticked off the many different types of devices that developers could design a user interface for using Visualforce.

Among those devices were laptops, desktops, mobile devices and even medical devices.

If, Salesforce is indeed targeting medical and other industrial devices that typically use an embedded proprietary operating system or one with somewhat limited capabilities like Win CE or an OS from Wind River, then Visualforce could become the front end for an online operating system that includes the security, the database, the application layers and now the UI.

In an interview following the keynote, Parker Harris, a Salesforce.com co-founder said the technology for working off line, which includes the UI, is currently part of the platform.

At first blush an on demand embedded operating system sounds like an oxymoron. However, add in more reliable networks, the ability to work off line when needed, and the ubiquity of online access through Wi-Fi and cellular, and it begins to sound far less outlandish.

By starting with devices that have limited capabilities Salesforce could be heralding a major advancement in what the future network is able to deliver.