Two of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, Michael Krigsman and Naomi Bloom recently published dynamite posts that got me thinking.  Michael’s post asks whether Salesforce (and by extension, the rest of the Cloud world) can retain its youthful Mojo, or whether they will, “sacrifice customer delight to features, functions, process, and conformity for its own sake and, dare I say it, greed.”  Naomi goes a step further and predicts that Enterprise Software companies that don’t embrace the new technologies involving mobile, social, and cloud will wind up in the Dinosaur Graveyard.  Both posts are must reads.

My take on all this?

The needs of the Cloud have fundamentally changed how the software works.  Naomi delves into this in her post, and I spend more time in my sponsored InfoBoom post discussing how the Cloud helps Simplify Complexity.

I’d like to present a couple new terms while I’m at it:  “Complexity Debt” and “Legacy Debt”.  I add the word “Debt” to these two in the same spirit that we use “Debt” with “Technical Debt”.  Like financial debt, these are sources of friction that build up over time and slow us down if we allow them to get out of control.

Check out the InfoBoom post for more.

Happy Holidays!