BILL Gates and his Microsoft empire are often challenged by others in the IT industry; people like Sun’s Scott McNealy and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
Now comes Marc Benioff, who is claiming the end of software.
Benioff, 41, is the founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, an on-demand online business application service provider. Instead of buying and loading software on computer hard-drives, Salesforce.com rents online access to its customer management software. Businesses pay a monthly fee for each registered user.
During a press conference in Singapore, Benioff displayed his personal Salesforce.com applications with the map services provided by Google and Yahoo, Excel functions provided by Google, Numsum.com or Irows.com and word processing functions by Writely.com or Writeboard.com.
“I don’t see any reasons to use the expensive and complicated Microsoft Office,” said Benioff.
After spending 13 years at Oracle Corp, Benioff founded Salesforce.com in March 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand customer relationship management solution that would replace traditional enterprise software technology.
“The software giants were huge but I don’t fear them,” Benioff said at the conference.
“Were huge”? I think the verb is still “are”. Probably future tense, as well.
Actually, this is how I got into computing, 23 years ago. Sales management, traveling with a portable computer, communicating orders at night from whichever motel, checking messages on the corporate BBS.
His system looks reasonable — for setting up a mobile sales force with inexpensive notebook computers. That’s about as far as I’ll go.
“His system looks reasonable — for setting up a mobile sales force with inexpensive notebook computers. That’s about as far as I’ll go.”
I thought that too at first…after having used it for a year, I can say it has definite potential as a platform for enterprise class apps, especially considering everything that they’re doing with AppExchange. Its pretty nice not having to deal with the operations aspect of enterprise apps.
I’ve used Salesforce, and it is a great product. But I don’t see it overtaking Office. Most of the companies I work with are not the savviest when it comes to computers, but they all have learned how to use Office. Getting some companies to change their ways, especially smaller companies, is like pulling teeth.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard claims like this I’d be richer than Bill Gates!
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
– Ken Olsen President, Chairman and founder of Digital, 1977
Anyone else want to bet the ranch on tech predictions?
Love to all.
Fundamentally, there is no difference in pay as you go, lease-ware and the pay more, but less often standard/Microsoft model. Only by building a better 800 gorilla-ware suite will anyone derail Microsoft. The more likely scenario, should Microsoft feel even slightly threatened by this strategy, would be that it decides that the Salesforce.com customer base would be a good snack.
There’s also the fact that people don’t always make the right decisions. For example, word processing tools. I wouldn’t use MS Word for all the tea in China. (same with OpenOffice.org, Abiword, and the like)
For presentation-oriented media like posters and pamphlets, you use a proper desktop publishing package. For content-oriented stuff like books, you use something like DocBook or LaTeX. (Or, if you want a nice Word-like GUI on top of LaTeX, do as I do and use LyX.)
Not only is Word the WORST of both worlds, It STILL hasn’t managed to deliver true WYSIWYG functionality after a decade or trying.
Why would anyone pay for “online software” when free open source OS and applications exist (even tailored to many possible personal preferences, to quote post #6 [OpenOffice AND LaTeX are free, open source])… When bussiness gets tight with spending Open Source is where they’ll go, not the online software (which in my opinion is almost a scam)…
That’s a pretty big assumption that we’ll all have stable and fast internet connections in the future. I’ve been hearing this crap for years and I still don’t think everything is in place for this to be a good deal. Hey, while we’re at it, let’s rehash another “great idea”… pay-by-the-minute internet service. Sorta like Compuserve. Do any of you remember those days? No thanks! I’ll enjoy my unlimited anytime/anywhere usage of my software on my hard drive.
Wow, that sounded cranky… 🙂
When internet connections become bulletproof this is something I’d think about. Small companies use Word because of the inexaustable supplies of bootleg Office 2000 disks that seem to out number even AOL disks. As we don’t all make super sized presentations or write books, Word (and Excell) simply works for the small scale stuff the small office does.