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Business software maker Salesforce is telling gun retailers they must stop selling AR-15s if they want to continue using the company’s business applications. The Washington Post reports that Salesforce is a $120 billion San Francisco-based company whose “skyscraper…towers over the city as the tallest building and a major landmark.” They are now telling customers who sell firearms that they are barred from using Salesforce “technology to market products, manage customer service operations and fulfill orders” unless they cease selling AR-15s. Salesforce’s “Acceptable Use Policy” goes beyond a ban on AR-15s, to include any semiautomatic firearms “that have the capacity to...

NEW YORK CITY --- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, always game for a little tech trash talk, said that Microsof's Windows 8 operating system would be "the end of Windows" and that "Windows is irrelevant."Benioff, answering questions at a press conference at the Cloudforce show in Manhattan, mostly kept to the script of promoting Salesforce's cloud services during the QandA session with reporters and analysts. The main Cloudforce keynote mostly mimicked all the announcements at Dreamforce last month, except for the just-announced addition of 20 social analytics services to its Marketing Cloud.Veering off-script (or was it?), Benioff talked about Windows...

SugarCRM has become the second open source software company challenging proprietary client/server ISVs to land a technology partnership with Microsoft. The start-up and Microsoft have announced plans to improve interoperability between Windows Servers and SugarCRM's hosted customer relationship management (CRM) suite. SugarCRM additionally plans to release a distribution of its Sugar Suite under Microsoft's Community License, part of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative. The Shared Source Initiative is Microsoft's program that allows customers to view Windows source code, launched in response to concerns over the security of its software. The SugarCRM partnership follows last year's announcement Microsoft would integrate its Windows...

Salesforce.com Inc., which has posted strong growth in offering customer relationship management software over the Internet, said Monday that investors of rival Siebel Systems Inc. were put "out of their misery" with Oracle's planned acquisition of the software maker. Salesforce.com, which is holding its Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco this week, has reported strong revenue growth as the CRM market shifts from in-house deployment to offering the sofware as a web service. For the second fiscal quarter ended July 31, Salesforce.com reported a fourfold increase in profits and a 75 percent jump in revenue. The number of subscribers topped...