I'm going to come out and say I think the article over played its hand in trying to describe a riff between the two companies.<p>Once a company gets big enough you'll find that it often both competes and partners with the same company at the same time.<p>It's just inevitable, as the salesforce trying out Microsoft's Azure while competing with Microsoft's Dynamics arm.<p>Good CEO's are pragmatic, almost out of necessity, as being inflexible is the quickest way to become unemployed.<p>I'll go out on a limb here and state that I believe that salesforce will eventually be owned by Microsoft.<p>it gives Microsoft 3 things.<p>1) Enough revenue to make a dent in Microsoft's growth.<p>Remember the old saying that Microsoft has to grow by one eBay each year just to keep wall street happy. Sales force is big enough to move the needle for Microsoft.<p>2) it provides a cap stone customer for Azure.<p>I think Azure is fully featured and mature enough that everyone will consider it to be in the same category as amazon or google's cloud offering but, this checks off a box for Fortune 500 CTO's who need to see a big customer using it.<p>Something Something something ... never getting fired for buying IBM<p>3) Sales force is going up against oracle and Microsoft here. They are just learning what Yahoo when through.<p>Trying to compete against competitors who have cash cow monopolies in other areas that allow them to fund a business to compete against you really gets tough quickly.<p>Salesforce is well run and has a great start but billions of dollars a year in almost guaranteed profit gives companies alot of time and opportunity to compete and fail over and over again until they get it right.