Salesforce CEO Benioff: Future Software Will Look Like Facebook 156
Nerval's Lobster writes "Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is unapologetic about his love for Facebook. 'I think all software is going to look like Facebook,' he told media and analysts at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. 'Everyone is going to have to rewrite to have a feed-based platform.' If people can collaborate on tagging a photo, he added, they could easily do the same with a product or business problem. Even as Benioff touted his Facebook love, however, Salesforce is veering away from the Facebook model in one key way: whereas Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg felt his company focused too much on HTML5 for its mobile apps, choosing to focus instead on native-app development, Salesforce is embracing HTML5 for its Salesforce Touch app, which delivers Salesforce data such as Chatter feeds and contacts to a variety of mobile devices."
Re:He's confused (Score:4, Interesting)
You're missing the point, and the history of the analogy. He started of selling Salesforce as "it's going to be like Amazon": i.e, you go to a site to do stuff, and you never worry about what's actually running behind the site. He is now starting to sell Salesforce as "it's going to be like Facebook": i.e., when you do your CRM stuff, you'll have information feeds coming from other people in your company that are related to what you're working on. It's going to be public, and you will be able to subscribe to any information stream (with some customizable limitations), instead of having to wait for IT to add you to a mailing list.
He's not saying that all software is going to be built like Facebook. He's saying that all software is going to have built-in information streams from people you know. It's an exaggeration, yes, but it's the Dreamforce pep-rally. It's supposed to be feelgood exaggeration.
he's actually right (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm loathe to admit that a trend-surfing PHB is right about something, but in this case, he's actually dead on the money.
You guys are thinking about software applications like eclipse, photoshop, or excel/word, etc.
That's probably not what he's talking about. What he's talking about is software you use to run your business.
I build this kind of thing for a living at a truly gigantic company. "Ticket systems" they used to call it back in the 90's but these days you'll hear "workflow management", etc. I'm continually amazed at how well facebook does a kind of massive collaboration platform that literally millions of people use all day every day, that is so simple to use, that there are literally no instructions and nearly everyone in the world who wants to, can use it just fine.
Sure they're "collaborating" by posting captioned cat pictures, arguing with their long lost high school buddies about politics, and playing dumbassed flash games with social hooks, instead of troubleshooting routers and customer equipment, but the principle is damn near IDENTICAL.
I'm amazed by this because I've been building this stuff for like 15 years and every off the shelf product gets it wrong. Nearly all of the industry standards get it wrong. Every purpose-built in-house project gets it wrong. But these spiky hair'd startup kids got it right without even knowing what they were building.
Kind of amazing really. Those of us in this field DO have a lot to learn from facebook.
now I guess I've gotta turn in my "krusty old guy" card or get back to telling 'em to get off my lawn
Thoughts from a Salesforce User.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Several of my companies "suppliers" use Salesforce.com's tools to manage their customer base, that means me. As a result I've been a user of Salesforce's "solution" for some time. The result is some really, special hate for Salesforce.
Aside from the usual complaints that their software is super-buggy, requiring almost monthly tickets with my vendor to have someone on their side open a ticket with Salesforce to fix some relatively minor data corruption issue that should have never of happened, I can also see where he is going and how stupid everyone at salesforce.com must be to go along. In the latest iteration rolled out at one of my vendors I can "friend" people in my vendor portal, and get a news feed from my friends. Of course, my vendor won't let me see what their other customers are doing, so the grand total of my "friend" list is myself, my boss (so he can place orders if I'm hit by a bus), and my vendor sales rep. Never mind that under normal circumstances there is zero activity for my boss or my sales rep, but even though they have disabled me seeing other customers the software repeatedly asks me if I want to "find more friends", or share what I just did with them.
I'm leaving out what my vendor actually does, as it's esoteric, and now going to use a made up example.
Me: Please ship me 1 case of packing tape. Web site: Did you know your friends might be interested in Packing Tape, would you like to share?
I can see some niche markets where they might have a play, but honestly for most people using their software their direction makes absolutely no sense. More importantly, spending all the time on these "social" features when the base application is buggy and slow and never works right makes absolutely no sense to me. Their various iterations have been so bad my boss has actually agreed to add a "no salesforce.com portal" to the checklist for new vendors, and it's one of the major reasons we're thinking about moving away from one of our current vendors.