February 9, 2006 5:22 PM PST
The knock against Salesforce.com
The knock against Salesforce.com has always been its ability to scale. Company execs say that's not a worry, and Wall Street apparently agrees. Salesforce.com's shares are trading near the top end of their 52-week high. Yet the software-as-a-service provider continues to wrestle with periodic outages.
My colleague over at ZDNet, Dan Farber, who was tipped off to the latest glitch and has been all over this story, aptly notes that customers will only put up with so much. Salesforce.com downplays these brown-outs as the very occasional cost of doing business.
Maybe so, but that's not the way to land the General Electrics of the world as your next customer.
Charles Cooper has covered technology and business for more than 25 years. Before joining CNET News, he worked at the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet. E-mail Charlie. 
