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Lemonade or Kool-Aid?
Elliot Gold, the space-age futurist, nutty professor of the teleconferencing industry, and jetpack-wearing bon vivant who acknowledges drinking lots of lemonade wrote us last week, after having obviously been drinking at the trough of those pump-and-dump Yahoo that track WebEx. Acknowledging that some other analysts think he's "nuts," (note to readers: all analysts regard all other analysts as nuts and regard paying clients as perfectly sane) Elliot wondered whether the rumor that on-demand CRM pioneer SalesForce.com would buy WebEx might indeed be true. This, of course, was in the context of Conferencing News needling the lemonadaholic with the fact that WebEx's stock in 2006 is up, up, and away like a beautiful balloon and Elliot has been predicting WebEx would hit a wall. (Full disclosure: WebEx is a sponsor of Conferencing News and in the summer, by coincidence, we're often seen on the shores of Cape Cod playing with blue-and-green beach balls.) Wrote the G-man to CN: "Turns out rumors are circulating wildly about WebEx being bought, or making some big announcement over a dinner Monday September 25."
So, Elliot, ol' buddy ol' pal: What do you think of today's spate of press releases by WebEx pertaining to SugarCRM (competitive to SalesForce) and ecosystem of on-demand collaboration applications? Let us know, because we think you're drinking too much of the Kool-Aid doled out in those message boards! Oh, yeaahh!
All in good fun: Elliot does indeed have a laudable 71% batting average in conferencing industry predictions!
September 26, 2006
