I saw that salesforce.com surpassed US$1 billion in gross revenue last year. That’s pretty cool. But what floored me was the statement from Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, that the company was “the first billion dollar cloud computing company.”

Wha?

I didn’t even know that salesforce.com was a cloud computing company, and thus the statement pretty much pegged my BS meter.

But if you look down at the bottom of that press release you’ll see the statement “Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company.”

How can they make that claim? While I often use them as a great example of a Software as a Service (SaaS) company (which they call themselves as well) I’ve never thought of them as a cloud computing company. Are they referring to the force.com side of the business?

I asked John Willis, my resident cloud expert, about this and he wrote back:

Laugh clown laugh…. 🙂

Amazon just toppled 40 billion S3 objects and 490k developers. Amazon Web Services is single handily re-defining small business around the world. Rack Space’s cloud has reached 34k customer’s in around 1 year.

My guess is he wasn’t too taken by the claim as well.

Why do companies do this? Here is salesforce.com, hitting a sales milestone to be proud of, and they have to go and frack it up by posturing as some sort of cloud company just because it is trendy at the moment. And it’s not even like their stock is doing all that poorly – it’s up nearly 50% from the 52 week low of US$20.82 which isn’t bad in this climate.

Is it me? Am I the only one who feels the need to point stuff like this out? It strikes me like the commercial open core software business model trying to masquerade as open source.

It’s funny. I have a vested interest in educating the market on open core vs. open source, but I could care less about the cloud. But still I get all bent out of shape when I read stuff like this.

I need a hobby.