Top tech journo joins Salesforce.com

WILL THE LAST tech journalist to leave the meeja industry and join a highly successful software company, doubtless pocketing large amounts of dough, please turn out the light?

OK, so maybe it's not that bad but the departure of eWeek veteran Peter Coffee for Salesforce.com is a worrying/encouraging sign for the rest of us left to labour in the salt mines and at the coal faces that are the nearest equivalents to life on the IT beat.

Coffee is a big loss to this odd little business. For the best part of two decades he has been one of the top names at eWeek and the once-mighty PC Week as it was previously known. He knows a heck of a lot, particularly in the areas of software development and usability, and has always dispensed that knowledge with a spare, no-BS style, declining to get involved in the marketing-driven holy wars and short-term manias that grip many of us in this fly-blown outpost of the fourth estate.

He leaves to take up a position as evangelist for the Apex programming language that is Salesforce's pincer movement for winning the hearts and keyboards of developers. It's a plum job: if Salesforce succeeds it stands to build an empire in on-demand software that is analogous to that of Microsoft in client/server.

Coffee rejoins former colleague John Taschek who is now a VP of product marketing but once ran eWeek labs.

Salesforce pays more attention to media coverage than almost any other company in the business but one other company also tracks every word and is adopting a similar tactic of hoovering writers - Jon Udell recently announced he was leaving InfoWorld for Microsoft.

You can get your Coffee fix here but sadly for only one more column. µ

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