Browse > Home / Salesforce.com News / Blog article: Benioff takes shots at Microsoft in latest interview

Benioff takes shots at Microsoft in latest interview

March 18, 2008

Dan Farber and Charles Cooper of Cnet recently interviewed Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. In the interview they focus on Salesforce’s shift to the platform-as-a-service model and on the company’s competition. Benioff’s responses are telling, and well thought out. The Q&A session also shows that Salesforce.com’s main man knows his stuff, having a much better grasp on the direction of the software industry than his rivals, something he points out by taking regular shots at big wigs such as Microsoft.

A couple of quotes from the interview I found interesting: 

Does this kind of economic climate, where there’s lots of uncertainty, make it easier or tougher for someone selling software as a service?

Benioff: The power of software as a service is that it’s less risk than software, no matter what. That’s because the traditional software model has you buy the software and then you attempt to implement it. The risk is all yours. You’re kind of paying up front. With software as a service, you pay as you go so the risk is mitigated over time. If it’s not right for you for whatever reason, you’re not as far into it as the old model. The old model was you bought everything–the software, the hardware, the implementation–and then you had to make the determination: Is this the right product for me?

Author’s note: I found the above quote interesting as it got me thinking about the risk involved on the part of the customer in any business transaction. Clearly the more you can reduce the risk for the customer, the more likely the sale. Certainly any number of industries could benefit from giving this question some thought.

You’ve shifted from software as a service to platform as a service. How do you think you’re doing in terms of colonizing the Web with your platform as a service in terms of getting companies to just shift over to this new model–where it’s, you come to us and we do everything for you?

Benioff: It’s taken about a decade of Salesforce to kind of get the software service movement to really happen. We will be 10 years old on March 8 of next year. People overestimate what you can do in a year and they underestimate what you can do in a decade, unless you’re (Apple CEO) Steve Jobs.

I think that it’s going to take a decade to make platform as a service happen because it’s the re-creation of all the ISVs (independent software vendors), the technology also, the ecosystem, the implementation, and so forth.

And just in the same way that we don’t want to be the only ones doing software as a service, we certainly don’t want to be the only ones doing platform as a service. We want to be able to clearly show that this is the future of the industry, too.

Continue reading at Cnet.

Written by admin · Filed Under Salesforce.com News 

Comments

Got something to say?