Salesforce.com: Another Valley IPO

prostoalex writes "It's a young company led by charismatic executive, it shows impressive growth, is located in Silicon Valley and recently filed for Initial Public Offering. Nope, it's not another Google story - New York Times profiles Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com, the company that said No to software applications (mostly Siebel and Oracle apps) and said Yes to hosted CRM solutions (which it hosts on its own servers). Benioff's personal philosophy is interesting as well, as he calls himself compassionate capitalist, believing that corporate philantropy and check-writing should end, but instead the company should allow their employees to dedicate 1% of paid time to volunteer projects in the community." I've used SalesForce for a while now - it's pretty slick. The era of the web-based software package has come.

Comments

Charity ends at home?

[Hittite Creosote]

Volunteer projects in the community? What if you'd prefer to do charity work that works with problems a little further away than something that might interfere with your comfortable world on your drive to work? Let's face it, if your company relies on global industry - and it almost certainly does - then putting something back to the (relatively) poor in California doesn't exactly compensate for exploitation of other parts of the world that we're all implicated in.

In other words, in this policy it appears that charity begins, and ends, at home. Foreigners can get stuffed.