Salesforce.com's announcement that it will offer content management and content collaboration as one of its services raises some interesting questions. For the full story of what the company is unveiling today read Salesforce.com wants to be a content management player. In the usual hyperbole that is Salesforce.com's signature stance in its press releases and public pronouncements, Marc Benioff is quoted as sayi Salesforce.com’s announcement that it will offer content management and content collaboration as one of its services raises some interesting questions. For the full story of what the company is unveiling today read Salesforce.com wants to be a content management player. In the usual hyperbole that is Salesforce.com’s signature stance in its press releases and public pronouncements, Marc Benioff is quoted as saying, “Salesforce Content represents a decisive step toward our vision of managing all information on demand.” “Managing all information” is a pretty big deal. The release goes on to say that “companies no longer need to buy bloated on-premise document management software to build applications that are based around documents and other content.”I wonder if the folks at Salesforce are aware that a lot of that bloat comes from new Federal regulations for e-discovery of documents? See a story I did on this a few months ago to learn more about it. Content management is not a trivial application. If you don’t have the right system, it could cost your company millions of dollars in fines and lawsuits. The release goes on to say that Content Exchange, the app dev environment that will be used to create Salesforce Content, “takes Web 2.0 concepts and ties them to the enterprise.”Josh Greenbaum, an analyst with Enterprise Applications Consulting says that just making something Web 2.0 is trendy but not too interesting.“It’s not going to bring home the bacon,” says Greenbaum, questioning whether or not making content collaboration available on Salesforce will garner the company new customers. Neither Greenbaum nor I see a lot of bona fide revenue from the Web 2.0 world to date.Finaly, on first view, this reminds of the predicament Apple always seems to get itself into. Wisdom on the street says Apple keeps having to come up with the next big thing, first it was iMac that saved their hide, then it was the iPod, and now the iPhone and AppleTV. This as opposed to companies like IBM or HP that just roll along and build their customer bases by slowly and steadily adding value to their current products.Is the Apple strategy what Salesforce thinks it needs to follow? Is content management its next big thing? I’m off to the event, where I hope to interview Marc Benioff and to see what this is all about. I will report back later this afternoon. Technology Industry