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Salesforce CEO Benioff: Future Software Will Look Like Facebook
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."
I look forward to a feed based version of Photoshop or any CAD program...
I use software to create art. There is nothing more wonderful than art by committee.
This is a person who goes to meetings instead of doing productive work. Software used by people who do actual work will not be redesigned this way.
He's confusing Facebook The Application with Facebook the communication / social network. Facebook has never been a success because of its software. The software has essentially always worked just well enough to facilitate what people came there for, which is to communicate in a feed based manner with friends and family. I have never, ever heard anyone (besides this guy) go on about how wonderful the Facebook software is. In fact it is always the opposite.
My grandparents are on Facebook for one reason and one reason only. They get to read messages and view pictures about family members they care about - information they otherwise could not get through any other channel. I'm sure that a very significant number of people are on FB for the exact same reason. That has nothing to do with software, but content.
Again, the Facebook software facilities the social network, not the other way around.
Better known as 318230.
Every few years, someone pops up and says "Everything is going in X direction, this is what we'll be using/how software will look". Generally speaking they're usually dead wrong. Most famously, Andrew Tanenbaum once argued in 1992 that "... 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5".
1997 came and went, everyone was running non-free Windows 95 on their 200MHz PentiumMMX beige boxes.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Yes it takes great skill to attend meetings, sign cheques and provide "vision". He didn't build shit. Thousands of programmers employed by him did.
I wonder, what would the career of someone who did know what they were doing look like to you?
This is a guy who appears to have started out as an enthusiastic programmer, climbed through the ranks in his early career, and ultimately founded and developed a company that has effectively pioneered a new model for developing and using software, reaching a market cap of over $20B along the way. And presumably he didn't have thousands of programmers working for him when he founded that company.
But what exactly is he trying to say? Online cloud based collaboration is the future. That is what everyone is saying these days.
Well, it seems he's been saying it for a decade or two, so I don't know what point you're trying to make there. He hasn't just argued for "X as a Service" models, he has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they can work for customers and be wildly profitable for suppliers at the same time.
I don't know the guy personally. I've never worked with him. I don't know if he's a good man in real life, or whether he treats his people well at work. I have no interest in defending someone against justified criticism. But I do believe in fairness, and I don't like seeing people attacked without cause. Going by what I found with a bit of Googling, his business is extremely successful, and I can see that he seems to get credit for his philanthropy and his company has featured prominently on lists of the "based places to work" kind, so it doesn't sound like he's doing too badly.
Basically, this guy seems to have had many geeks' dream career, and he seems like a decent person too. It's really sad that some people here just seem to want to hate on him. Is there something I didn't find that makes people dislike him, or is it just envy?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.