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."

Comments

Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

I look forward to a feed based version of Photoshop or any CAD program...

Re:Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't just feeds though, it's also the awesomely awkward interface, and the total lack of data privacy. _Those_ are things I can totally see winding up in a future version of Photoshop, when they replace the 'save' button with 'save to internet', and to save to a local file you end up needing to go through three screens of sub-options (not menus, screens. Menus are so out of date, just ask Microsoft and Win8!) before you find the small print and checkbox needed to actually store the damn thing on your own computer.

Re:Yeah

[MightyMartian]

Could be a great news ticker!

"CEO diagnosed with testicular cancer" ... "Amy Jones in Accounting bakes prize winning chocolate cake" ... "Share price falls 45%, massive layoffs expected in next quarter" ... "Come dressed as a super hero next week to raise money for the homeless" ... "CFO indicted on embezzlement charges" ... "News ticker updates outsourced to India, job losses in that department expected"

Re:Yeah

[brian_tanner]

Awesome timing. I just got this e-mail a few minutes ago: adding design "feed" to AutoCAD WS.
http://www.autocadws.com/blog/introducing-the-design-feed/

Re:Yeah

[mcgrew]

Not to mention companies like to keep things confidential and out of view from competitors

What I want to know is why a bunch of nerds like us would listen to anything a CEO has to say about the future of software development? That's like an astronomer telling a room full of physicists about the future of physics.

Re:Yeah

[Chris Mattern]

"That's like an astrologer telling a room full physicists about the future of physics."

FTFY

Re:Yeah

[RenderSeven]

"17 people LIKED your checking account balance"

Re:Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure why the stock market reacted so harshly to Amy Jones' cake. It was really good!

Re:Yeah

[rtb61]

Look on the funny side. Imagine feed based sales. A sales representative makes an appointment with a customer, a secretary leaks it to 'salesbook'. Instead of one sales representative turning up to the customers office, 10, arrive all clamouring for a meeting. That's crazy insane competition thinking, real world that's a pissed off customer harassed by idiots. How about architecture where anybody, including the customer can start adding bits to the plans, that building will stand up, achieve budget and be built on time, with an architect proud of the result, 'not'.

There seems to be a sudden burst of greed driven ignorance versus clear thinking professionalism going on out there. I'm thinking that some of that bullshit politshpere from the gut thinking is start to leak into the business world. Facebook, a social networking fad, no different to myspace, instead of one sucker buying it 'Newscorp' a whole bunch of suckers bought it.

Currently Facebook most horrendous mistake is not using their junkbond shares to buy up other companies that actually have a long term future. Make hay while the sun shines. If the market wants to accept the value of those shares then bloody use them to buy up what ever you can while you can and forget the silly talk.

God I hope not.

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's anything I need less of in my life it's "feeds".

Shoot me now.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use software to create art. There is nothing more wonderful than art by committee.

uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Please leave vim alone

[h4rr4r]

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.

Re:Please leave vim alone

[Asic Eng]

Yeah, maybe we can rewrite the headline to: "Ignorant CEO of irrelevant company is wrong about future software trends".

Future software

[ackthpt]

which looks anything like Facebook, will be the subject of intense litigation.

Pretty much any future software will be.

main () { printf("Hello world!"); } © PatentTrollsRUs

HTML 5 wont come in business

[Billly Gates]

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

He's confused

[Dan East]

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.

Re:He's confused

[NeutronCowboy]

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.

Re:He's confused

[medcalf]

I think your central observation, that people don't work the way they play, is very insightful, but the rest is problematic. It seems to me that the reason that the feed/open sharing idea is so frequently a failure in business is not because of politics, at least not in most of the places I've worked (some of which are very political). Rather, it's because people's jobs are specialized. People need certain information to do their jobs, and everything else is just wasting time.

Consider where I work now, which is largely a FOSS company (at least the division I'm in) and which has a very collaborative environment. I work with an infrastructure team, a database team, and a couple of project teams. None of them really cares deeply about what I do except as it relates to their own work. Thus, a feed of what I'm doing all the time would be a set of information where the messages are always useful to someone, but any given someone would only get use out of a fraction of the messages. If the infrastructure team has to filter out a hundred messages to get to the one they care about, that's a huge waste of time for them. It's like a SCRUM with too large a team, and for the same reason.

Businesses need a way of quickly, transparently and broadly sharing information that also allows you to not see information you don't need/want. The conflict between these requirements, plus human nature (tagging could solve it, if people would/could consistently and informatively tag), is sufficient to make this kind of model unlikely in a business.

Salesman thinks we all work like him...news at 11

[TheWoozle]

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.

This happens every few years...

[logicassasin]

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.

Re:This happens every few years...

[mcgrew]

The future always ends up looking remarkably like the present, just with a few more cool toys, and a higher degree of complexity to our lives.

I see you're not very old yet. have you ever been had surgery and been anesthetized by ether? That is some wicked nasty shit that is a true nightmare going under (you literally think you're dying) and when you wake up, youre sick as a dog. Now? In the sci-fi 21st century, they say "ok, you're going to sleep." You say "how long until I'm unconscious?" and they reply "we're done, you're in the recovery room." Have a cataract? Sorry, you're going to need a guide dog. Today? A CrystaLens implant gives you better than 20/25 at all distances, even if you were severely nearsighted before.

When you left the grocery store carrying big paper bags of groceries, you have to pull the heavy door open to get out of the store; no magic doors that opened when you got close.

Your car had no ABS, air bags, seat belts, disk brakes, cruise control, air conditioning, or fuel injection. Your small car was lucky to get 20 mpg on the highway, and the lead fumes it belched made children mentally retarded. There was no EPA so when you drove past the Monsanto plant you rolled the windows up even if it was a hundred degrees outside, because the air would burn your lungs. Want to go fishing? Fine, but I'd advise you not to eat the fish... the lakes and rivers were all horribly polluted.

Speaking of children, many of them died or were crippled for life from polio.

Want to eat a TV dinner? No microwaves to do it in five minutes, you had to pre-heat the oven for ten minutes and cook the TV dinner for half an hour. Popcorn? Again, you couldn't just toss a bag in the nuker and hit the popcorn button, you got out a pan and some butter, melted the butter in the bottom of the pan, pour the popcorn in, put the lid on, and stand there shaking the pan for ten minutes or so until the popcorn stopped popping.

Cool toys? Sheesh.

Make a phone call? Well, first you have to find a phone booth, get out of the car, look the number up unless it was one you dialed every day (with a real dial on the phone).

Want to watch a movie? You have to go to the theater. Balance your checkbook? Do the math with a pencil, there weren't any calculators; not affordable ones, anyway.

Drill a hole? Drills all had power cords.

Complexity? Life was far more complex back then. Everything was harder to do.

Specialized Software vs General Applicatiions

[hutsell]

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.

Re:Give me a break!

[Mephistophocles]

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.

he's actually right

[plurgid]

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....

[Above]

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.

Re:Give me a break!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:Give me a break!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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?