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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...
If there's anything I need less of in my life it's "feeds".
I use software to create art. There is nothing more wonderful than art by committee.
Remember, ten years ago when the iPod was the hot thing, everything started looking like iTunes and now all software looks like iTunes. It's going to be just like that, right?
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.
which looks anything like Facebook, will be the subject of intense litigation.
Pretty much any future software will be.
main () { printf("Hello world!"); } © PatentTrollsRUs
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Most just spent hundreds of thousands migrating to IE 8 and these intranet apps wont run on anything else. If salesforce.com makes html 5 sites their customers simply will ignore them like they are shunning Google Docs now for not supporting IE 6 and 7.
Maybe in 10 years after 2020 will these users leave IE 8. It does not make economic sense to do so especially after they blew all this cash just for IE 8 in 2012! ... oh and people are not getting paid to hang out in social networks. They are getting paid to get work done. Traditional apps like photoshop, autocad, quickbooks, excel, outlook, etc enable people to do such that. Uh, work!
That is just common sense
http://saveie6.com/
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.
How unusual...a person views the world through a filter based on their personality and preferences and doesn't realize their own biases and that other people might think/work differently...
In other news, for some incomprehensible reason, most non-technical people don't like the CLI. I don't understand why they would hamper themselves by using a lesser interface.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Yeah. "Random Salesman CEO Spouts Nonsense Showing His Lack Of Clue".
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.
Looks like most people don't understand the comment, or understand just how important collaboration is. I'm sure you understand how important it is that everyone on your team works in the same direction. That requires collaboration. What he's saying is that collaboration that is restricted just to the immediate people on your local team is not enough, and often you need more input from people only tangentially related to your project. Getting stuff done quickly and reliably requires having easy access to those tangential people, without having to move up your chain of command and down the other.
Everyone always is amazed at the flat company structure of Valve. What Benioff is saying is that software needs to flatten all company hierarchies to the same extent, and collaboration feeds that are open to everyone will help with that.
Now, is a good amount of what he said pure fluff? Sure it is. But quite frankly, I'd love more built-in communication abilities in my software. I hope he is right on that.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
If the software Marc Benioff is referring to are applications meant for business communication and collaboration -- with his knowledge, experience and success -- he has a decent probability (imho) of being right.
However, the Internet isn't ubiquitous and doesn't have the following properties:
1. The Network is reliable.
2. Latency is zero.
3. Bandwidth is infinite.
4. The Network is secure.
5. The Network is homogeneous
Until it does, instead of trying to turn my computer into a dumb terminal, the applications I use not requiring bandwidth are better being used offline at my convenience on my own equipment.
Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why
I work for a company that has a love affair with social media and a bit of a love affair with SalesForce... kinda. I've seen their software and we've tried hard to even use some. When Chatter was brought to our company, it was well received. Once people started trying to use it, it became extremely obvious that it's a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. The only problem that it could possibly solve is "How to we get our employees to act more like they're using Facebook?" Sorry guys, we're not (all) children and we want Big Boy Tools to get our jobs done.
Do you really want your employees to feel comfortable posting their photos and comments from drunken nights of debauchery on company systems? Seems like a bad line to start trying to make fuzzy.
Yeah. "Random Salesman CEO Spouts Nonsense Showing His Lack Of Clue".
No kidding. "Benioff shamelessly kisses Zuckerberg's ass." How is this news? All I see here is a clueless CEO talking about something he doesn't understand.
Ok ok - at the risk of spouting the bloody obvious, collaborative software is cool. But it isn't new, by any stretch of the imagination, and Facebook certainly didn't invent it. Nor is Facebook the shining standard in collaborative platforms. Maybe it has the largest user base, but just because millions of people use it doesn't mean it's awesome. In fact, as adaptations of collaborative software go, I would even put Facebook at the front of the pack. I find it horribly frustrating and klutzy (or I did, for the couple of years I actually had an account). "All software is going to look like Facebook?" God help us.
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
Welcome to the 20th century,
what do you think notification e-mails have been playing as a role in Enterprise communication? It's the feed, it has been since the 1990s.
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
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
He's right. The issue is not what Facebook shows. It's how the pages are put together. It takes work by a lot of servers to assemble each page. The user-facing servers send out queries to servers which check the feeds of everything being followed - friends, events, calendars, messages, applications - and create a page to display. This page is updated automatically if you keep it open. You can look at any of these items in more detail, and go back into their past if desired.
That's what managers do - follow many changing items superficially and look at some of them in detail. A management version might have feeds for shipments which missed their ship date, incoming orders, customer complaints, personnel absences, due dates for major supplier shipments, and other items of interest. Different users would be watching different things, some info would be available only to some users, and users would set what they wanted to see. If you've ever used a Bloomberg terminal, it's a lot like that, but with worse graphics.
Facebook has a reasonable platform for that sort of thing. The back end is databases and message passing. The business logic and formatting is mostly in PHP (for which Facebook has a hard-code compiler, so it doesn't take forever). Facebook also has decent solutions to the "tell me if it changed without polling too often" problem.
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.
One of the great things about high profile CEOs is that when they say controversial things, you can look them up and decide how much credibility they really have. So, I did.
It turns out that this particular "random salesman CEO" started out selling computer games while still at high school, worked as an assembly language programmer at a little company called Apple, made VP of another little company called Oracle at the age of 26, and has since built arguably the most successful cloud computing company in the world and turned himself into a billionaire.
You might not agree with his personal philosophy of software or this prediction of the future, but by some metrics Marc Benioff probably has more clue than everyone else commenting in this discussion put together.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Looks like most people don't understand the comment, or understand just how important collaboration is. I'm sure you understand how important it is that everyone on your team works in the same direction. That requires collaboration. What he's saying is that collaboration that is restricted just to the immediate people on your local team is not enough, and often you need more input from people only tangentially related to your project.
There is a very strong counterpoint to your analysis of Benioff's argument. And that is *focus* is what gets projects/deals done on time. Increasing the circle of concern past what is absolutely necessary for a given venture necessarily creates all sorts of problems like groupthink, design by committee, and analysis paralysis... and that's just for starters. Check out the anti-pattern wiki for a list of things that over-communication can often be the root cause [1].
SFDC is a very successful venture, sure. But look at another very successful venture which is now the largest capitalized company of all time (and still growing) - Apple. The success mantra from Apple for the past decade has been *focus*. If you have sales or project teams who are effectively crowd-sourcing their design/review/approval process, then how can you expect anyone to get anything done? How do you prevent pervasive anti-patterns from cropping up?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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.
We at Salesforce have bet the rance on facebook. Please PLEASE buy our stuff.
Which version of Facebook is he talking about? Facebook has changed the way it looks so many times, even Facebook doesn't look like Facebook any more! On the other hand, Facebook has changed its look so many times, any look will be like at least one version of Facebook!