It's a blast to be joining you here on ADN in my new job as Director of Platform Research for salesforce.com. During the last few weeks, as I've been winding up my 18 years of product and technology analysis at eWEEK, I've encountered three good omens for this being a terrific time to be here.

• When I was composing an on-line slide show of Top 10 Challenges for the Enterprise IT Professional in 2007, one of the slides that I wrote gave the challenge, "Meeting Demands: Make on-demand, software-as-a-service and other utility computing approaches the default strategy for new projects."
     I didn't mean "challenge" as in "this will be hard"; I meant "challenge" as in "this is something you should commit yourself to achieving." I meant it -- but I realized that it would look too much like grinding my new employer's axe while on my old one's payroll.  I put in something else -- something entirely valid, but not as stirring a call to arms as what I originally had in mind. Now I can say what I was really thinking then.
• When I was taking part in first-round judging for the 2007 CODiE Awards, in the categories of Software Development and Software Testing solutions, I found myself appalled by the idea of downloading hundreds of megabytes of code for even a trial-edition product that I would only be exercising with a few tens or hundreds of kBytes of data. I should have been sending the data to the code, not the other way around. The ratios were just all wrong. It was a timely reminder that developing and deploying an application in an on-demand model makes literally thousands of times more sense.
• When I had the opportunity to attend Apex Day in San Francisco on January 16, I met the salesforce.com partners who are already adding value on the platform -- and heard their enthusiasm for what they'll be able to do with what's soon to come.

But it's not my job to tell developers that what we'll have is what they'll want. It's my job to make sure that it's true. That means communicating outward about the opportunity that we want to create, and also communicating inward about the needs that developers want to see addressed by Apex.

I look forward to learning.