Linkedin poll: “Which one of these CRM providers will be the leader in 5 years?”

Many of you may have voted in the linkedin poll “Which one of these CRM providers will be the leader in 5 years?” sent by Rick Vargas Expert Direct and Database Marketing, CRM / Social CRM, Business Intelligence, Sales Force Automation. So far (7 days left), there has been 14526 votes and Salesforce is a long way in front with 40%, followed by Oracle CRM with 29%, then MS CRM with 25% and a long way behind SAP CRM with 6%. I think that in the next days the ranking will not change that much.

What I found funny is the people comments containing “with no doubt” or “without any doubt”. They probably have not read yet the excellent books from the mathematician and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb “the Black Swan”and the editor in chief of WIRED, Chris Anderson “the Long Tail”. I warmly recommend them, I would say that they bring an interesting analytical framework that is very useful to understand the world around us.

So, to come back to the subject of the poll, for my vote I would not say “without any doubt” as there is always uncertainty in predicting how a market and its actors will evolve in the future. I have been working on SAP CRM for more than 10 years and I think that it is the most powerful CRM solution in an integrated architecture. Nevertheless, I would vote for MS CRM as Microsoft has the biggest desktop software installed base with Office suite, natively integrated with MS CRM, which will probably ensure a huge potential of development for MS CRM and will make Microsoft become the leading CRM vendor.