Dear Salesforce,
I've been doing some work with you lately, and I was hoping to hook into you using your APIs to automatically insert some of our leads. Unfortunately, I can't. Despite the fact that you have a full API, it seems that you've chosen to restrict API access to "Enterprise Edition" and higher level accounts, and at my office we only have a "Group Edition" account.
I've been trying to think of a good reason why you would do this. I'm doing my best to lock our small but growing business into using Salesforce. Why wouldn't you want that to happen? I'm trying to tie myself intimately into your infrastructure. I'm trying to make it impossible to extract myself from being your customer down the road, but you're thwarting my attempts at every turn.
Think of how it would increase my switching costs if something better comes along. I would have to tell whoever is pushing us to adopt the new application, "Sorry, if we switch we'll have re-engineer our app." It would set the bar much, much higher. Also, it would only help your case for sticking around if I could say "You know all of that cool stuff that our app does with Salesforce, it'll all be gone if we switch over."
So come on Salesforce, how about making both of our lives easier and opening things up. I'm sure that some high-up executive there is telling you that there are a bunch of good reasons not to. I'm here to tell you that that person is wrong. Open up and this relationship will be better for both of us.
Thanks in advance,
Kurt