Salesforce.com, which over the years has morphed from on demand CRM application to on demand enterprise applications platform, now wants to attract occasional users to its compute cloud for a few bucks a shot. And alongside it, Salesforce is packaging “development as a service” to encourage developers of ad hoc applications to use the cloud, and has packaged development tools for Force.com into an IDE.

Of course, if you want occasional users, you need the kind of productivity applications to run on the environment to get them. To date, Salesforce subscribers have written roughly 50,000 on the Force.com platform, but those are primarily backbone business applications, such as add-ons to CRM. To a minor extent, they may also include reporting tools, but for the most part, these are not the apps that users would log onto intermittently.

So along with the a la carte computing, which is formally branded Called the Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture, comes Force.com Development-as-a-Service. It bundles in a metadata API so you can create more flexible apps by making them metadata-driven rather than hard-coded, a source code control tool called Force.com Code Share, and a new Force.com IDE that adds to the existing core Apex language development tool goodies such as the ability to edit schema, and the ability to do GUI design for Visual Force screens with an HTML screen painter.

The whole Tour de Force ad hoc apps strategy is a logical add-on to Salesforce’s overall platform strategy. That is, to become the enterprise computing platform for its client base, it needs to serve more of the enterprise. So it’s using this initiative to penetrate to people who don't normally use CRM or anything else in the AppExchange, not to mention the occasional users who all want end of month reports at 5:00 on the last Friday of the month.

But if Salesforce really wants to hit occasional users, they should also take it one step further, to encouraging Web 2.0-style Ajax mashups. They already have the tools in place, and have also embraced adobe’s Flex rich client. Our take is that the whole Web 2.0 Ajax phenomenon is in large part driven by the urge to cobble together ad hoc, highly disposable apps intended for one-time uses, such as a Google Maps mashup of prospects for a specific sales promotion. Giving business users the opportunity to uses these at a dollar a shot would do wonders to spur use of those Force.com compute cloud cycles, even when it's not the end of a reporting month.

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