I've worked with Salesforce for 4+ years now (as customer and partner), and sadly I agree with you. This should be the message that someone at salesforce reads. Want to be invited to their pilots? Want to have access to their PMs? You had better not say anything bad, I even had my AE pull me aside when I was out there for an EBC to tell me to not bring up their recent service outage during the meeting. If you don't have anything nice to say about salesforce, they don't want to hear your voice.
Was at Dreamforce last week and it felt like one giant sales-pitch-cum-Anthony-Robbins event.
Let me know if you have a few minutes to chat, and how best to contact you. My email is in my profile. Thanks!
Now, very few people can confirm that they had no views of their videos because most people watched it themselves several times and/or shared the link. One person claims they had zero views on the video, which isn't a very good sample size. We had 18 views of our video by the time judging ended and we had 16 before it started, but whether those two were by judges or by people we shared with, I have no idea. Either way, it wasn't viewed multiple times by many different judges as we've been told.
So how does this constitute a full review and audit. The reality is that SF royally fucked up on many fronts and lost developer cred in the community. As if they cared in the first place.
If they attempt this next year, they need to appoint an outside 3rd party to oversee the contest and git rid of their own employees from the process.