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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.
a CEO with a soul? I thought the deal was you sold it to the devil to get that high up. hmmm..
"charismatic executive"
One word. Oxymoron.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
That's what - two and a half work days a year? I spend more paid time then that reading slashdot - per week! (And that isn't exactly making the world a better place.)
"Compassionate capitolism" sounds like more than just good karma (although that's part of the package), it sounds like a responsible thing for a corporation to encourage.
It seems that capitolism tends to encourage greed and selfishness, perhaps a concerted effort towards community building will help balance things out.
If Gmail has caused so much concern about privacy, I wonder what salesforce.com won't do! Externalising IT services, or even CRM software support is one thing, having all your customers information stored outside and out of your control may be another....
I'm not saying externalising is bad. It's the trend in the industry but still I find customer relations are among the most sensitive information a company handles
It would be nice to see other employers adopt this - especially if the company uses any OSS applications. Trouble is, it looks too much like doing free work for someone else to be widely adopted - and it'd cost in management time to ensure that the 1% isn't exceeded (it's easy to get carried away on a train of thought while coding!)
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Yep, that figures. The top ranked post in this article is some moron criticizing this idea because it's not enough. Yes, this is so much worse than the 99.9% of companies that do absolutely nothing.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Even if it's 40 hours, you're not going to spend 24 mins every week doing charity - you may spend 3 hours on company time every 2 months.
I guess this allows the company to organise charity programs that it feels suits its own philosophy and knows where its $$ are going.
Not a bad idea, imho.
"One percent of Salesforce's profits are diverted to a foundation that Mr. Benioff created when founding his company, and employees get six extra days off a year to volunteer in any community program."
You're still allowed to do more than that, it's just that the company pays you for some of it. I think this is a great thing to do. My company does something similiar. They pay you for certain charitable and civic activities, and pay your time if you donate blood during the blood drives they have 4 or so times a year. I think it's great when companies try and give back to the communities. Is 1% enough, well people will all say different things, but I say it's a nice start, remember, these companies are in business to produce something, and make a profit, NOT to provide charity for the community, the fact that they do ANYTHING for the community is a big plus, and should be encouraged, not denigrated. Just my $0.02
Liberalism...the next best thing to thinking.
Ummm, actually capitalists are what made this country what it is. Everyone running around with their hand out to the government, or via lawsuits will be the downfall of this country. Just where do you think money comes from??
Liberalism...the next best thing to thinking.
However, business analysts were cautious as it is still likely that the sales people will lie through their teeth to get as many customers as possible to buy this product and that software engineers will still be descending onto each installation in their droves to debug major problems the day after the system goes live.
Move along, nothing to see here apart from "man in smart suit speak with forked tongue".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Without capitalist companies and businesses, hiring and paying employees, and vendors, and taxes there would be no money. The government does NOT create wealth, private industry does.
Liberalism...the next best thing to thinking.
Cost-wise, if you employ 100 people then that would cost the company the same as having one person working full time on community projects. This is better than nothing, even with the reduced productivity involved in spreading this time over 100 employees.
It would be interesting to work out how much a company would save using free OSS over existing solutions (think OpenOffice vs. MS Office) and how much employee time that would equate to that could then be donated back to the community.
It's a great idea to donate something back, even if this particular implementation isn't the best way.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
I (obviously, see nick) am pretty convinced that web applications have loads of advantages as deployment, manageability and what not, but for a CRM application I have serious reservations. Applications that users interact with constantly need to be above all, responsive. An accountant wants to play piano on his numpad without waiting for the application. When an administrative employee is holding the phone and looking something up, every delay is very very annoying
Artists against online scams http://www.aa419.org/
Everyone seems to be complaining about 1% being "merely" 30 minutes a week. That's still loads better than... gasp!... NOTHING!
I don't know how things operate there, but I get this feeling that you don't just do 30 minutes a week, but rather do 4 hours every other month, which would be like half a day off. And to be honest, paid or not, people that do community projects do it for free anyhow. It's nice to get a little compensation, but more importantly, it's nice to have someone say "we support the work you didn't have to do."
There's a lot more to community projects than just coding for OSS. I'm actively involved in a community project, and spend a lot of my private time. It's actually voluntary community service, but hey, that counts too doesn't it?
So, 1% or not, that's still 2 free hours of pay every month. Not bad, not bad. It sure as hell beats zilch, and more importantly I get this feeling that the company would say "well, we can't pay you for more than 1%, but you are certainly welcome to work for free for yourself." That's loads better than my employer, who seems to think that I'm slacking if I work any less than 11 hours a day, and is sure to increase my work load which makes my voluntary work very difficult.
I really don't think that the prospect of in-browser toolbars killing the application is a major cause for concern given today's client-side options.
First, any organization making serious use of this sort of application ought to have paid some attention to locking down their workstations. Yes, I *do* understand that "Mom and Pop" shops are usally running XP Home boxes they picked up at CompUSA, but that's simply not the case for midsize and enterprise clients. Heck, even our small business customers know better, mostly because we provide them with LAN solutions alongside programming services.
Second, a great deal of browser-based misery can be alleviated by using a better browser such as Mozilla to navigate through the web app. To address those who would worry about non-IE browsers breaking web application functionality, remember: there's no reason not to target your app to Mozilla if you know your sales people will be running it on their laptops/desktops.
All in all, web-based application solutions represent a much better way of managing most companies' data when compared to "traditional" client-server solutions, at least in many key respects. 100% of our new development is web applications built on Perl/PostgreSQL/Oracle foundations, and we're definitely not hurting for new businesss.
Incidentally, most privacy concerns can be addressed by simply providing a dedicated (whether in-house or public access via secure authentication) server to host the applications in question. One box per client, and so forth.
personally I think that he does it for the publicity. Charities tend to get a lot of free press which would cost him a lot more if it were paid advertising ( alot more then 1%).
Adam Boalt
SmoothStart.com
Actually sales executives love it because it tracks their own sales people: Do they keep busy, are they hustling for new business, do they keep their sales funnel loaded, .. do they have all their information in the system so that we can fire them next week?
Tracking customers is a nice spin-off.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Umm, actually, Keynsian economics is what made this country what it is (at least after the Great Depression). If it wasn't for government social assistance programs that arose during that period, it would have taken a lot longer to get the economy going again. If there is a downfall, it will be in no small part due to the ignorance and arrogance of the neo-con capitalists.
"Every year, corporate philanthropic foundations pour $30 billion into their endeavors in the U.S. alone," said Benioff. "Many of these efforts occur in isolation with little or no relationship to the communities in which they operate, the people they employ, or their corporate missions. Compassionate Capitalism calls for a new model - one that closely aligns business and community goals and focuses on serving the communities in which a business operates."
That's probably the strongest paragraph in the press release that makes me doubt just how compassionate this whole idea is. So instead of doing things "the old way" - spending money on unrelated good causes - companies should concentrate on donating time and money locally... but why in particular? Not because local needs are higher, but because in the end this helps the company. It's really more "profitable philanthropy" than "compassionate capitalism".
Now I'm not saying that this isn't preferrable to giving nothing back and putting excess profits entirely towards ivory back-scratchers, but at its core this is a philosophy of self-interest, not good will. And it's not exactly a new idea, either... plenty of organizations from well-meaning companies to corrupt political machines have known that helping out your community in the right way can be very profitable in the long run. In a broader sense, the fact that helping the people close to you is in your best interest is just one of the basic features of living in a society.
So while I'm glad that communities are benefitting from this strategy - and they are, I think, as I do have a few local examples I've witnessed of this sort of behavior - it isn't compassion that's motivating people here. It's concern with the bottom line, just like everywhere else in business. And call my cynical, but a business being concerned with the bottom line just doesn't inspire very much admiration in me.
I assumed that 1% meant more like 3 days. So they have paid vacation time, some paid sick days and/or personal days and 3 paid volunteer service days. Somewhat like lawyers doing pro bono work. It could still be BS though; like if they have simply 'renamed' some of the normal vacation or personal days.
The era of the web-based software package has come.
And what do I do when I have no internet connection for hours on end? This happened recently with SBC in CT. What am I supposed to do, go home? That is not an option, and we are too small a company to have a secondary connection for back-up purposes (don't ask - I wasn't allowed any input in that decision).