Salesforce.com's Benioff Disses Windows 8, Oracle

An anonymous reader writes "Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is the latest to predict Windows 8 will be a disaster for Microsoft, but for a different reason than some others: he says that Windows is simply irrelevant in the new era of cloud computing and bring-your-own-devices (BYOD), which will become clear to corporate IT decision makers when they confront the upgrade decision. Of course, this conveniently dovetails with Salesforce's market position, so consider the source. Another interesting development is the growing rivalry between Benioff and his old boss Larry Ellison; Salesforce.com is a longtime Oracle shop, but they have just announced intentions to hire 40-50 PostgreSQL developers."

Comments

Yeah well...

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to their cloudy-cloudness offerings, they've been anti-MS in other respects, directing some nastiness at microsofts old CRM solution.

Oddly, their doc merges only work right with IE, and they're usually about 3 versions behind on working Office plugins.

Not the finest development team on earth, in my opinion.

Re:Yeah well...

[pointyhat]

I wish to back up your point here - my company uses several kludged together bits of crap that sit on salesforce. They regularly fall over and leave people SOL. Even the helpdesk runs off it, which usually means when the EMEA cluster goes bang, we can't take support calls. The only advantage being that a couple of years ago, everyone's holiday entitlement was wiped out, which was nice as we had to tell the company what it was :)

Re:Yeah well...

[hairyfeet]

The real elephant corpse stinkin' up the room though is while the whole "cloud everything" might work in the enterprise frankly its consumers NOT enterprise driving sales and the consumers are getting squeezed by the ISPs with ever higher prices and lower caps. The whole "Do everything in the cloud" idea was tried a decade ago and it bombed then and it'll bomb even worse now. Hell why do you think the ISPs were so willing to go along with the 6 strikes shit? Because it'll let them cherry pick their customers and only keep the ones that don't use a tenth of what they pay for, letting them oversubscribe that much worse without having to run any new lines!

As for Win 8? YOU know its shit, I know its shit, even my little old lady customers that tried out the Win 8 system i have sitting in the shop hated the damned thing. The #1 reaction by far I got to Win 8 at the shop was "Why would I want my computer to act like a cellphone?" because lets face it, that is what it is, its the bastard hybrid Frankenstein between WinPhone and Windows and frankly does neither role well. And honestly I think the whole "BYOD" thing is overhyped as those customers I have that are bringing their iPad to work are using it as a glorified netbook/notepad. They still have and use their laptops, they just carry the iPad for the basic mundane tasks that's all.

Saying the tablets are gonna kill the PC is like saying mopeds are gonna wipe out truck sales because the moped is so easy to park. Its two totally different use cases with VERY little overlap, the reason PC sales are down is simply because for the past several years both AMD and Intel have been selling monsters that are several times more powerful than what the user actually needs so people don't see the point of upgrading as often, that's all. ARM is at the point where the PC was in the mid 90s, where a unit from 2 years ago would struggle with the latest programs, no different than how that 700MHz P3 was quickly made obsolete thanks to the ever rising clocks and software designed to take advantage of it.

Mark my words but I think you'll see the exact same thing that happened to X86 happen to ARM very soon, only whereas X86 hit a thermal wall with ARM its gonna be the battery, even the ARM holdings group has been talking about having "dark silicon" because the battery would go dead so fast as to make the unit worthless if they turned on all the silicon. Mark my words when that happens other than the Apple fans for whom using last year's model is like wearing last year's fashions most will see no point in the constant replacing and will stick with what they have until it breaks. We are already seeing a race to the bottom just as we saw on the PC, with many talking about how dual core ARM tablets will be sub $80, maybe even sub $50, so its just a matter of time before ARM ends up just like X86, not replaced until the previous one croaks.

Re:Yeah well...

[Billly Gates]

The PC is dying.

You may hate Metro ... modern, with a passion but there is some truth in it. AMD is about to go belly up in the coming months, MS profits are down 20%, Intel's fabrication plants are only at 50% capacity, sales of all PCs are diving.

The recession in Europe is hurting sales as many are keeping their pentium IV clunkers when you have unemployment as high as 20% in places like Spain and Italy! But a lot has to do with tablets. My parents are a classic example. They are not technical people. My father used to be an IT manager ... back in the 1980s but he has more experience managing IBM 370 Cobol projects and calls email, lotus CCmail still, and remembers Lotus 123 for Windows 3.1.

He loves his IPAD. What are his uses? Internet, and email. The IPAD is a much better platform as it is easier, more reliable, less prone to malware, has nifty features like a cam on both sides, and is super portable and cheap. Tablets cost less than laptops because of the Windows tax.

Windows 8 UI will hit some resistence at first. But I am warming up to it. Fanboy site Neowin showed modern so easy a 3 year old can use it [neowin.net]. Many older people still refuse to leave XP because they have change so much and will fight tooth and nail to leave IE 8 as well because it is what they know. Young people embrace and learn. You can use Windows 8 in the desktop and it is usable. Just different. If Windows 9 makes it easy for more than one tile on the screen, a task bar for Metro applets, a much more sane way to search for files with instant search that wont take up the stupid screen, then I may opt for a tablet with Windows 9 in 8 to 10 years when my Windows 7 desktop is on life support.

Why carry a tablet and a PC hairy? You can use just one device that is both and use Office and a web browser. Remember the people whining about Windows 95 and do you enable the program manager and file manager back? The young folks at time (us) embraced it while the older ones scoffed and didn't want to learn. I am not sold on Modern and will sit around and wait and see people's reaction. But I am open to relearn it if that is where the market is heading.

Re:Yeah well...

[Billly Gates]

The cut and paste killed the link.

The link with the 3 year old is here. Also Hairy your store deals with the less technological users. People under 30 know how to reinstall their OS and clean malware for the most part and can figure out Windows 8. THe over +50 grandmas probably just left AOL a few users ago and do not what a tab is when they open IE 8 or dragon assuming you install it.

Re:Yeah well...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You make a lot of bold claims there, but they are obviously controversial and you haven't cited any actual data to back them up.

For example, why do you think AMD has only months left? They made a loss in Q3 and they're cutting their workforce, but they still took over $1B in revenues and have over 10,000 employees. That's almost certainly enough scale to survive a bad year or two while they reposition, which is exactly what their CEO said they would be doing on their Q3 call.

And I don't buy your argument about tablets replacing PCs at all. Tablets serve very well as a convenient portable information consumption device. For households that don't have any greater needs than that, sure, maybe they can do without a PC. But anyone who is doing anything creative is going to need way more capabilities than any tablet offers. That includes almost all business use and anyone who likes to send messages that don't fit in a txt msg or tweet, just to name two obvious and huge groups where tablets have no chance of replacing PCs. In short, saying tablets will make PCs obsolete would be like saying cell phones or games consoles would make PCs obsolete. Those things didn't happen, because we're talking about different tools for different jobs.

For the same reason, trying to push UI paradigms that have been reasonably successful on small, primarily consumption-based mobile devices onto a general purpose PC that is also used for creative work seems like a poorly thought-out idea to me. Between that and the evidence from Vista that people won't upgrade to a new version of Windows just because it's the new version of Windows any more, I'm skeptical about the course Microsoft seems to be charting with Windows 8.

Re:Yeah well...

[Billly Gates]

First claim is the big investment houses expect it to fail. It is not investment grade anymore which means they can't get loans to cover debt. The big investment houses made that call and the data shows an upcoming bankruptcy.

Keep in mind companies like Apple got this bad before. It is possible but highly unlikely they can make up the revenue enough to give their books a more positive outlook in an accounting sense.

Second, if people can run Office and all their apps on a tablet with a keyboard cover they will do so. Why carry 2 things? As of now the IPAD lacks a keyboard and productivity software. But for general use they are superior with a better OS, longer battery life, higher DPI, etc. Will Metro catch on? I do not know. I do know pro Modern UI crowd is correct that people hate change and I remember hacks on geting file manager and program manager for Windows 95 because using the start ->all programs was too scary.

With a hybrid it is certainly possible a cheaper WIndows RT device that has a keyboard and the top comes off as a tablet that can run IE 10 (a decent IE for once), angry birds, and Office then the PC turns into a niche.

Re:Yeah well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most user activity is limited to email, movies/music, Facebook, and simple word processing. If they play games, they are simple games such as Angry Birds. It can be easy to see why an iPad is attractive over a desktop PC. The new UI Microsoft is trying to push facilitates these, but is too late to the game in a market already established by iOS and Android.

However the desktop PC is not dying (Laptops are likely to go away, but they have always been cumbersome and suffered poor battery life). It will possibly revert back to what it used to be: The platform where real work gets done for technical professionals, enthusiasts, and hard-core gamers. The new UI Microsoft is trying to push is an abysmal failure for these tasks.

AMD's upper management is incredibly inept, so I'm not surprised to see them dying. However, Intel will likely survive the transition and remain the number one chip vendor for desktop PCs and Servers. People tend to forget that we'll still need servers to run everything in the back end.

Re:Yeah well...

[Tough Love]

The whole "Do everything in the cloud" idea was tried a decade ago and it bombed then and it'll bomb even worse now.

I wouldn't try to take that to the bank if I were you. In 2002 Gmail didn't even exist. Today, for massive herds of private individuals it is the only email they know. And corporate adoption is going exponential. And Gmail is far from the only player in that space.

If you wanted to make a case for "the cloud won't completely kill the PC" I'll buy that, but from where I sit, the day where more email as sent through cloud interfaces than PC clients is probably already here.

Tablets VS PC... daddy will use the PC, Mommy and the kids will use the tablet. Daddy would use the tablet somewhat too, except the kids always have it. Time to get a couple more tablets. No, the tablet won't kill the PC, it will just end its reign as the predominant form of computer.

Sorry if you're suffering a little future shock today. I should also mention that land lines will soon be something that only old people have.

Re:Yeah well...

[TechyImmigrant]

>even the ARM holdings group has been talking about having "dark silicon"

'Dark silicon' is a stupid idea. Going down that route is just evidence that you're too stupid to do power management correctly on chip.

BPM (Bad Power Management): Have a power controller that turns things on and off as they are needed.
GPM (Good Power Management): On chip units know when they are needed and turn themselves on and off as required.

You simply cannot get BPM to scale with complexity. You hit a complexity wall because a central command entity can't know the details of supply and demand between every entity on chip. So behaviors are wrapped up into 'power states' and OSs, drivers and applications get dumped with dealing with power states and bugs aplenty arise.

GPM just requires than individual entities ensure that they are on when they are needed. It's a relatively easy task to identify the things an entity uses and the things than use an entity. Tie the power switches to entities a this level and power management happens from the bottom up. Nothing in left on necessarily.

Dark silicon is just an aspect of BPM, whereby you duplicate functions or add specialized functions (think CISC) that aren't used all the time, so they can be turned off when not used and so the power density across the surface of the chip goes down. If power density is a problem, modulate the clock with temperature rather than doing bloody stupid things like dark silicon. It is an admission that you have more transistors available to you than you know how to use well.

Re:Yeah well...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

First claim is the big investment houses expect it to fail. It is not investment grade anymore...

We have to be careful with terms here. Many things can be a bad investment at their current share price, but sound as an ongoing business.

...the data shows an upcoming bankruptcy.

Which data is that? That's really what I'm looking for here.

Second, if people can run Office and all their apps on a tablet with a keyboard cover they will do so. Why carry 2 things?

But this is exactly the argument I don't buy when it comes to tablets.

I work in software development, so admittedly my requirements are greater than average. Still, I have over 10 megapixels of desktop in the monitors on my desk, and I frequently use all of it at once and wish I had more. That desk is also home to a full size 105-key keyboard, complete with all the useful special keys in the correct places, various other input devices, phones/chargers, and so on.

There is no way you're ever going to set up a keyboard and tablet ergonomically enough for me to use for more than a few minutes at a time, and unless you're planning on making it unfold to give an order of magnitude more screen area, there's no way even the largest tablets (or laptops for that matter) are ever going to cut it for my serious work without plugging into much higher-spec external equipment. Oh, and my main workstation has more processing power and RAM than all the mobile devices in my office put together. It also has a workstation-class graphics card, made by AMD coincidentally.

I don't necessarily see desktop/workstation/server computing staying in tower cases or rackmount form factors that we use today, but I don't see the idea of having a dedicated work area with good quality input/output devices going away any time soon, and I don't see small and low power (in every sense) mobile components suddenly becoming equal in capabilities to similar components without those restrictions.

Besides, there will always be plenty of people whose applications do need as much raw processing power as they can get, even if an average device becomes powerful enough for an average user. Moreover, the managers and admin staff in every office I visit plug their laptops into a docking station with a large monitor, real keyboard and real mouse when they're at their desk, and in many cases they are just working with word processor documents, spreadsheets, database GUIs and the like. I think it's clear that even "average" business users have greater needs than any tablet/keyboard combo is going to service for more than a few minutes.

Why carry 2 things? As of now the IPAD lacks a keyboard and productivity software. But for general use they are superior with a better OS, longer battery life, higher DPI, etc.

Why carry anything at all? A lot of business people have laptops because that's what you have if you're a manager/salesperson/customer service rep who goes to meetings and sits at the table with a computer. However, those laptops are only necessary for a lot of these people because we haven't really figured networking out yet: we can transfer data from place to place, but we haven't build the UI concepts and security policies and all the other good stuff to really take advantage of it yet.

In twenty years time, would you be surprised if we just threw data around from one of the screens on my desk to yours across the office, or threw a report of interest straight up on the big screen in the meeting room with a swipe/tap/click/whatever? Would you be surprised if we had mini-data centres in family homes, storing all of their media and doing all of the main processing in a centralised place, but with screens and input devices scattered all around the house in useful places?

In any case, I'm not sure how an OS where I have to pay $3 for a ping app to diagnose a wireless connection problem is superior to every mainstream desktop

Re:Yeah well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a small background in finance as well. Basically the rating was for debt for things like bonds as well as obtaining additional credit. In business you live off lines of credit and not profits to pay for your bills. This is especially true if you have very large expenses and capital assets like AMD has to test and create chips.

You can be making record profits and go out of business at the same time waiting for customers who purchase on credit in 30,60, or 90 day terms. Retailers and companies like Dell do this so their costs are more even and do not spike and mess up quarterly reports if they need to buy a large sum at once. Shareholders will lower Dell's shareprice otherwise. This is why if Dell needs a lump sum of new chips they use a 90 day payscale etc to absorb the cost. Meanwhile AMD has bills to pay while they wait for that large pay day by Dell.

If the AMDs credit rating is junk or non investment grade they wont be able to pay their bills while they wait for revenue. So yes that is a very bad thing if a creditor says you are not investment grade. That means if I were another creditor the mathematical odds of never seeing my money goes up BY A LARGE PERCENTAGE.

This is what is happened in the US financial crises from 2009 - today, as well as Greece. Apple as well in the most famous case. Steve Jobs had to go to Bill Gates to keep Apple afloat as it was non investment grade and no bank or shareholder would touch it with a 6 foot pole.So in other words that link with arstechnica is a very big deal as even with heavy cost cutting they need some capital to keep the lights on. Worse companies like Dell will cancel their AMD lines and strictly focus on intel as they do not want to be left haning when AMD goes out of business. This perpetuates the idea that it is dying further etc.

Back to technical part of the post, I am quiting IT and going into the teaching profession. To me a tablet where I can run Office, browse the net, and play a game or two is about all I need. You are a unique fringe and use case. Just like mainframe users are. There are free apps in these platforms but the tablets are evolving more into tiny netbooks and can meet more and more needs as they gain MS Office and keyboards.

Re:Yeah well...

[lightknight]

Yeah, get back to us when tablets have more than 64GBs of storage, and don't need to be tethered to a wifi to get things done.

Some of us have lasted through the net wars between Netscape / mainframe-style thinking and Microsoft / local-machine style thinking. Microsoft, like it or not, won, because owning the last mile is what's important when designing a killer app. Stuff on the net versus local, local wins, at the end of the day. Just watch.

And you may ask, why is MS trying the net approach now, when they've owned local? Look who is at the helm -> it's the same kind of thinking that sank Sun MicroSystems. MS will tank for forgetting to protect the home turf, not because the home turf was unprofitable.

Re:Yeah well...

[hairyfeet]

Hey what do ya know, we agree completely that dark silicon is a retarded idea, which is why I said ARM isn't gonna be any different than X86 in a couple of years, with no more room to scale up and no where left to go.

What killed the MHz wars? The thermal wall. What is gonna kill the mobile wars? The "thin is in" aesthetic Apple is pushing combined with power hungry chips sucking batteries dead. In both cases while the chips themselves COULD continue going up, hell I've had buddies with last gen netburst singles and dual that managed to get over 4.7GHz on air, the problem is people simply won't accept the retarded trade offs in return for more powerful chips. in X86 you got to the point you needed a fricking AC unit for the damned PC and in mobile you are quickly reaching a point where the unit is about as "mobile" as a desktop on a dolly because you are simply going from one outlet to the next thanks to the iSliver battery not holding enough charge to actually use the smart side of the smartphone.

But I agree with you 100%, we see Intel and AMD both pushing more cores than all but the most hardcore users will EVER use simply because they have more silicon than they know what to do with, and on the ARM side you have dark silicon because they have more transistors than the mini iSliver batteries can reliably feed. While Apple has been conditioning users to carry a charger everywhere there really isn't much higher you can go as long as things stay as they are, simply because nobody wants a phone that is worthless without an outlet. hell you might as well just get a cheaper POTS phone if you are gonna be married to the outlets anyway.

Re:Yeah well...

[sunspot42]

Intel has the best fabrication facilities on earth, bar none. If they can't make it selling x86 chips, they could always open the floodgates to manufacturing ARM-based chips for Apple. There's more than enough demand there to soak up all of Intel's excess manufacturing capacity. It would dent their margins, but they'd still be enormously profitable.

If PC sales continue their recent tailspin, Intel may be left with no choice. They're counting on Atom-derived low-power x86 chips running Windows to save their platform's bacon. We'll see if Microsoft can deliver with Win 8 everywhere. My guess is it'll be a fiasco, but then Microsoft convinced plenty of idiots to buy that terd Vista, so who knows...

Re:Yeah well...

[sunspot42]

>Yeah, get back to us when tablets have more than 64GBs of storage, and don't need to be tethered to a wifi to get things done.

Wireless connectivity is almost ubiquitous at this point. I have high-speed connectivity at home and at the office. The era of the desktop computer is rapidly drawing to a close. The cloud is obviously supplanting it. I wouldn't be surprised to see the desktop PC completely replaced within 5 years by a tiny Apple TV-sized box you plug into your monitor. It'll communicate with whatever other devices and interface gadgets (keyboards, mice, motion control, voice) you happen to have on hand, and with your cell phone and tablets. It'll sport advanced voice control, like Siri but far more capable, all powered by the cloud. It'll do games too, via a service like OnLive, and media, and if you want to run high-end software like Photoshop that'll be available to subscribe to for $20 a month if you're a professional or maybe $5 for a one day one-off use. It'll all be running on incredibly powerful virtual machines out in the cloud, so folks won't need to blow $1,500 every few years upgrading their computers to run the latest & greatest software. You'll buy a $200 Apple TV like box, a phone and a tablet or whatever and subscribe to whatever level of service you require beyond that.

Ubiquitous connectivity changes everything. It's essentially headed toward Star Trek technology, where you say "Computer" and tell it what you want it to do and it does it. "Computer, book me a flight to Boston on August 23rd. I can't spend more than $350." "OK, do you want an exit row seat like you usually request? And I won't search United because you hate them."

Also, shifting processing to the cloud offloads a lot of battery burden from these increasingly tiny mobile devices, saving power for their wireless radios. In the business world, it gets companies out of having to pay the Microsoft tax every three years and deal with the hassle of swapping out expensive machines. If everything lives in the cloud, managing the dumb terminals becomes a lot easier.

Re:Yeah well...

[TheRaven64]

'Dark silicon' is a stupid idea. Going down that route is just evidence that you're too stupid to do power management correctly on chip.

It's fairly unusual that someone writes something in their first sentence that indicates that they have no idea what they're talking about and then goes on for four more paragraphs. Dark silicon is real and is a very important problem. The issue is that process improvements mean that we can fit more and more transistors in the same area, but the power consumption (and therefore heat dissipation) per transistor does not reduce at the same rate. This means that, to fit within the same power envelope, you have actively use a lower percentage of the die area with each generation. This means that it's worth spending transistors optimising for specialist tasks and that's why we're seeing more CISCy designs appear. Everyone in a computer architecture course has a good laugh at the extreme-CISC VAX having an evaluate-polynomial instruction, but RISC ARMv8 has a perform-an-iteration-of-AES instruction.

The rest of your post also indicates a complete lack of understanding of the issues. Reading any paper published on IC power management in the last decade should give you some idea of why.

Re:Yeah well...

[semi-extrinsic]

You lost it at "voice recognition". It has always been 10 years into the future. Siri is not a step forward, it is just much more limited in responses than previous efforts, giving a higher success rate. And why should I subscribe to a Photoshop thing, when my current computer can do it?

Re:Yeah well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I like Windows 7. I'm a gamer and Win7 works just fine to run Steam, Outlook, and Firefox/Opera. Why would I shell out money to upgrade my OS with all the hassles and headaches that go along with it when there's a perfectly viable OS that I like?

Re:Yeah well...

[pnutjam]

I will believe tablets will replace PC's when I see 8 year old hand me down tablets. They are currently designed to prevent that, so of course their sales numbers will be higher. Everyone already has a PC.

Re:Yeah well...

[TechyImmigrant]

You obviously don't know what I do for a living.

Re:Yeah well...

[hairyfeet]

I'm sorry but if you were any more full of shit your eyes would be brown. First Intel won't let AMD die anymore than MSFT would allow Apple to die in 97, it puts too big a bullseye on Intel for antitrust. if they have to give them the first gen core designs and a couple of guys? they'll do it, because it will cost them too much not to have a token competitor.

Second you are selling the same shit MSFT sold with Vista? remember that? How much easier it was? Didn't go over well though did it? Look at the reviews of 8 and what are the common themes? Stupid, pointless, retarded, frankenstein...these are NOT good words billy! These are the "words of failure" and are actually WORSE than they were for Vista? remember Vista? It amazes me how many Win 8 apologists seem to forget that Vista tanked and the users got what they wanted...which was Win 7, which is XP with better under the hood guts.

But you keep believing the hype Billy, me I'm gonna kick back with my popcorn and laugh! Win 8 is gonna make Vista look like a fricking hit, and Ballmer will most likely FINALLY get the fucking boot, which should have happened 6 fucking years ago when he failed to get a functional OS out the door for so long. In fact if it weren't for the fact that they can fall back on Win 7 I'd bet on MSFT dying before AMD, after all AMD still owns the low end market, you can buy quad laptops for $400 thanks to AMD, MSFT on the other hand has ZERO share in mobile and with intel and AMD selling multicores so cheap nobody needs to replace their OS but once or twice a decade. I have plenty of customers on Phenom I X3s that are happy with the performance.

Finally "young know how to reinstall their OS"? BWA HA HA HA HA HA...oh you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA...They grew up on cell phones, they know less than shit about computers or OSes or even what to fucking do other than take it to somebody, News Flash I have plenty of under 30 customers, my oldest is in college and sends a LOT of work my way because the college kids know even less than those that grew up on Win9X. I ask them questions and the only answer I get is "Its broke, it needs to be fixed" because they don't even have the vocabulary to explain what is broke. Ever see Star Trek TNG with the retard aliens? Welcome to the future Billy.

Re:Yeah well...

[TheRaven64]

No, no idea. If it's anything to do with IC design, then I'd suggest that you start polishing your CV...

Re:Yeah well...

[airdweller]

"People under 30 know how to reinstall their OS and clean malware for the most part..."
Source? Personal experience? That's hardly relevant. Cause mine is completely different: 90% of the people I know aren't capable of that irregardless of age (sample size: ~400). I know some who couldn't clean up their computers properly if their life depended on it (late 20s - mid 30's, senior/lead software developers). One of them got one of those FBI scareware viruses, tried cleaning it up himself, failed, torrented several W7 images/cracks/etc. (infecting his other computer in the process) and ended up wiping everything incl. the partitions during an OS repair reinstall.

Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[SpzToid]

And open-source is where business wants to invest, (even though business still wants to buy Real support).

Migrating away from Oracle to something like PostgreSQL is just being prudent while mitigating costs (and strategic risks).

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know in what world are you living, but in DB world, Oracle still rules supreme if you require 99% availability. There is _nothing_ even close to Oracle in this particular scenario. (I don't like Oracle, it's a mess and everything is super expensive, but .. it works flawlessly. If you pay enough.)

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[NeutronCowboy]

I think that's the real news: seems that Benioff wants to slowly move away from giving one of his biggest competitors giant wads of cash every year. That's going to be one hell of an adventure.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Patch86]

And open-source is where business wants to invest,

If only. Most big businesses (in non-technical industries) still avoid open source like they would office furniture made of hemp. Or my employer does, anyway. If it doesn't come with an MS/IBM/Oracle/Apple/etc. sticker on it, procurement won't touch it.

I like your optimism, though.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Anonymous Coward]

And open-source is where business wants to invest, (even though business still wants to buy Real support).

Migrating away from Oracle to something like PostgreSQL is just being prudent while mitigating costs (and strategic risks).

For toy databases, maybe.

Got a few hundred terabytes? 99.9% required uptime? Whether you like it or not, you're talking to Oracle.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[pointyhat]

I think you are confused. The only 99% uptime that Oracle gets are their lawyers, and the other 1% is spent upside down in their coffins.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Anonymous Coward]

Got a few hundred terabytes? 99.9% required uptime? Whether you like it or not, you're talking to Oracle.

I would give up on my business altogether before talking to Oracle.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Anonymous Coward]

And open-source is where business wants to invest,

If only. Most big businesses (in non-technical industries) still avoid open source like they would office furniture made of hemp. Or my employer does, anyway. If it doesn't come with an MS/IBM/Oracle/Apple/etc. sticker on it, procurement won't touch it.

I like your optimism, though.

My company sticks with big name proprietary only too. In exchange, we get unnecessary software, and nothing ever works properly. We will go bankrupt eventually, and no one will ever know why. At least we will make room for others.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Anonymous Coward]

if you want 99% availability you can use SQL Server, DB2 or Informix, with those you can get even 99,99% of availability very easily today even on commodity hardware.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[jythie]

It all depends on your use case. We just migrated off Oracle because it suited our situation poorly. Oddly enough, excessive downtime was one of the reasons we switched off ^_^

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[jythie]

Unless you want to go really high end, in which case you loop back ground to OSS.. at which point Oracle is for 'toy' databases with only a 'few hundred terabyes'.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Anonymous Coward]

_nothing_ even close to Oracle

Google? Nope.
Facebook? Nope.
YouTube? Nope.
Skype? Nope.
Wikipedia? Nope.
Amazon? Nope.
Craigslist? Nope.
Ticketmaster? Nope.
Twitter? Nope.
Etsy? Nope.

Of course the list is miles long.

And btw, 99% uptime is pretty terrible. Even twitter is way above that nowadays.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the adventure fails it won't be Postgresql's fault; it's a dandy little program. They should welcome some gotchas in the migration, it will give the PG dev. folks some more targets.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[PCM2]

If the adventure fails it won't be Postgresql's fault; it's a dandy little program. They should welcome some gotchas in the migration, it will give the PG dev. folks some more targets.

Hell, with any luck, Salesforce's "huge PostgreSQL project" will involve contributing patches and code upstream to the main project. But I'm not sure I'm ready to bet on it. Salesforce has never given me the impression of being a company that really gives a shit about technology. Their conferences are all about "sell, sell, sell!" and "transform your business!" and other management bullshittery. Whenever they announce that they're launching some amazing new technology that's an industry first, it's usually something that a dozen other companies have been doing for years, the only difference being that Salesforce's version is stuck running on Salesforce. Salesforce employees, on the other hand, tend to be zombified Believers, not totally unlike Scientologists. I can't really see this company attracting any really high-quality open source devs.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[NeutronCowboy]

Their conferences are all about "sell, sell, sell!" and "transform your business!" and other management bullshittery.

Well, to be fair, their software is all about how companies can do more "sell, sell, sell!"

But yes, Salesforce doesn't give a shit about technology. Which is why I consider this move away from Oracle a huge adventure: it's not something that Salesforce is used to doing, and will require them doing a rework of the internals of their entire core product offering.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Lennie]

They probably felt like they needed to do a rework anyway.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Lennie]

Maybe that is why they are in the S&P 500, they sell to management in a language they understand ?

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[CBravo]

Cognitive dissonance reduction. Read up.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Anonymous Coward]

As somebody who sells Oracle: sir, you are wrong.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[CBravo]

My boss generally does not touch non-OSS. Only 5 mega-euro throughput though.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[bungo]

I know you're trying to be funny, but a properly run Oracle installation will give you huge uptimes.

I run two 4-node RAC clusters. I've had 100% uptime all year, the only downtime was when there was work in the data centre. You can perform rolling patching an upgrades to one part of your RAC while the other nodes keep running.

If you look after it, then there's no reason for it to ever go down.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, in actuality, you did not have 100% uptime, no?

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you want to go really high end, in which case you loop back ground to OSS.. at which point Oracle is for 'toy' databases with only a 'few hundred terabyes'.

True.

Everyone always trots out Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

Of course, Google and Facebook and maybe even Amazon employ their own highly skilled development teams that dwarf the resources of most people - even those that might have hundreds of terabytes of data.

Why do the really HUGE guys go that route? Because at that level, needs are so specific and scales so huge that it's cheaper to roll your own, even if rolling your own means hiring a large team of really, really, really good developers.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[pod]

If you're into "a few hundred terabytes", you're not dealing with Oracle anyways (or even SQL) because you've already hit the query performance wall around 10 terabytes and had to look for alternatives, such as NoSQL and Hadoop and Cloudera.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[erp_consultant]

Workday is doing the same thing. They use MySQL. Dave Duffield learned his lesson this time around. Back when he was running PeopleSoft the majority of their customers used an Oracle database as they still do now. They also licensed a bunch of other third party tools such as COBOL (MicroFocus), Crystal Reports and SQR. Any application vendor that has an Oracle database at the heart of it is eventually going to get screwed by Oracle. That's just how they operate.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[RaceProUK]

I know you're trying to be funny, but a properly run <vendor> installation will give you huge uptimes.

FTFY ;)

The key is properly run, though I'll concede it may be easier to manage an Oracle set-up than a competitor's.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[gbjbaanb]

Ah, but bear in mind that you only see the the message sent to potential clients, not to internal techs. Inside Salesforce, it could be buzzing with the most erudite and advanced technical discussions possible, but you'll never see that because you're not part of that, instead you only see the marketing bull...

Of course, it could be complete uselessness inside SF.com too, but we can't really make an informed judgement on that.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[Lord_Naikon]

Hell even MySQL can get 99% availability. Just re-import the entire database once a year. I am not even kidding :-(

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[pointyhat]

Yes I understand that. We have run our large financial sector web application with *zero* downtime for over 7 years. This is all down to application architecture and failure planning and mitigation rather than spending money on Oracle. We have half of the service model hosts running on a SQL 2005 cluster and half on SQL 2008 R2. We can upgrade/swap each of these out with zero downtime at the *application level*.

Re:Oracle is much less relevant than open-source.

[mcrbids]

As a long time Postgresql user, I'd probably agree that hints are largely not needed simply because the structuring of the query itself allows you to "hint" what you need.

Compare these two queries:

SELECT customers.firstname, customers.lastname, invoices.id AS invoices_Id, items.description FROM customers, invoices, items
WHERE customers.id = invoices.customers_id and invoices.id = items.invoices_id AND customers.id = 12345;

SELECT customers.firstname, customers.lastname, invoices.id AS invoices_Id, items.description FROM customers JOIN invoices ON
(customers.id = invoices.customers_id AND customers.id=12345) JOIN items ON (invoices.id = items.invoices_id);

Baring typos, they are logically equivalent. Yet, based on my understanding of Postgres, the latter one will likely run much quicker because it hints to the query planner that you want to start at the customers table and link against a single record, then move on to the invoices for that customer, etc...

The query itself provides enough "hinting" that I've not had to bother with ugly, non-standard kluges like what hinting typically is elsewhere. Why not just stick to standard SQL?

Another moron CEO

[Scutter]

Windows (and, by extension, desktop computing) is irrelevant because people have iPads. Seriously, this guy is completely out of touch. It may be great for the CEO who never has to do any real work with a computer, but an iPad is wholly unsuitable for anything other than Angry Birds and checking your Facebook. It's a media consumption device, not something used to create and manipulate spreadsheets. The fact that "Windows is irrelevant" because of "the cloud" speaks to his complete misunderstanding of the technology.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy must from the 60's when it was touted that "programs will write themselves", "AI will soon make the world go round". Well it's actually been said ever since computer were invented. The fact is speech recognition is stagnant, AI is stagnant, databases are stagnant, etc. Oh they've made a few gains but not really. Yes everything has gotten bigger, faster, but no real strides have been made in decades. The "magic" this idiot thinks "just happens" is in fact written by millions of people around the world.

I agree on the angry birds comment. iPads should be treated like the addiction they are, not because they provide anything relevant or meaningful in the way of productivity. Productivity is the act of PRODUCING, not CONSUMING!

Re:Another moron CEO

[Psiren]

Agreed. I'm firmly of the opinion that widespread BYOD is a disaster in the making. You're still going to have to provide your staff with the tools and resources to do their daily work, but now you have to do that on any number of different and incompatible systems. Ignoring the potential security implications, supporting that in any meaningful way is going to be extremely hard. And you can be damn sure that laptops with Windows 8 will be one of those devices, so no, it's not irrelevant.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Austerity Empowers]

Agreed, unless Windows 8 was designed around tablets and Angry Birds rather than desktops and laptops. MS would never consider taking their (inexplicably) successful desktop OS and dumbing it down to work on devices where they have nearly 0% market share and have the status of has-been, or never-were. That'd be an unmitigated disaster, no company would be so foolish.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

I would imagine that iPads and tablets are useful to sales reps who work in the field. Also, he said that BYOD is what will kill Win8 not iPads. This includes anyone with a laptop running OSX, Linux, and Win7 or below.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Seeteufel]

Look, in an enterprise environment you don't need Win8. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade and seriously, we are now operating system agnostics again. Macs do just fine. Linux Desktops will be also fine unless they are called Linux Desktops. Our operating system is now the browser.

Re:Another moron CEO

[NeutronCowboy]

Here's the reality: a lot of people don't need a full computer. Their corporate life is either spent consuming content, or it is spent talking to someone and jotting down some quick notes.

Yes, there are engineers who program and business analysts who create spreadsheets (although what excel is being used for is a whole other horror story....). But the majority of management, all of sales, and much of marketing and PR is focused on consuming content and creating small, simple chunks of content. iPads are perfect for that. I know (second-hand) how much work is done on iPad, because all that work consists of checking email, writing quick emails, and pulling content off of the corporate intranet. From that perspective, he is right. Is he overselling his case? He sure is - then again, every statement by competent CEOs should be assumed to be nothing but advocating for the company, regardless of the reality of the situation.

For me, windows 8 is going to flop because it's the wrong OS for the wrong device from the wrong company: the desktop needs a full UI designed for creating content, not just consuming content. It also has to be efficient in that process, and not give them an interface designed for consuming content on a 4 inch screen. Finally, Microsoft is not a device and services company, no matter how much Ballmer wants to believe that. It is a business software/services company with a consumer division grafted on top of it. It might want to refocus itself, before it loses even its business clout.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Many mobile devices already have enough power for the average office user's needs, so rather than having a Windows workstation or laptop at work, in the near future you might just have a dock to attach your mobile device to, with external screen, keyboard and mouse there as well. Your data will be continuously synchronized to some (private) cloud. None of this requires anything with a Microsoft sticker on it.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Mobile devices like iPhones, iPads, and Androids are not just "media consumption devices", and in fact are enabling what is practically a golden era of user created content. That you don't see this does not mean it does not exist. People are doing everything from making their own movies to composing music and writing novels to photography and photo effects on mobile devices. The majority of youtube videos now created are made on mobile devices, and it scares "big content" that the little guy can now easily create content that was once the domain of people with deep pockets.

No, these are NOT just "consumption devices". They are allowing a new era of content creation, never mind a new era of social connectivity.

Windows increasingly IS irrelevant, no matter what you Microsoft apologists want to believe. Stick your head in the sand all you want: the sales numbers don't lie. The "traditional PC" sales fell 8% year over year last quarter, a trend that is predicted to accelerate over the next few years. Traditional PC companies are hurting as their profits are slashed by the popular shift to tablets and phones as replacements for what people used to do on PCs. People ARE shifting to mobile, no matter how you bleat about how that must not be happening. Sure, a few niche applications will remain PC-only, but for the majority of the market, a combnation of a phone and a tablet fills their needs much better than a finicky malware prone "beige box" PC.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Greyfox]

Tablets are pretty much to the point where you can treat them like a small laptop. I see a lot of people at work plugging them into keyboards and doing just that. And while the tablet form factor may not be suitable for a number of business applications, smaller smart phones actually offer a number of potential niche areas that you might find surprising. For example, some years ago now, I worked for a company that specialized in connecting wireless bar code scanners to legacy inventory systems. They numbered General Electric and Glaxo-Welcome among their clients. The wireless bar code scanners we sold to go with the systems were around $1500 a pop, bulky and used their own embedded languages which were inevitably difficult to work with. The same thing could be done today with a less-expensive and more-capable Android smart phone, using a programming language everyone is familiar with. That may not be the sort of business use you envision, but it's well beyond just checking facebook and playing angry birds.

And really, if no one in his company ever creates a spreadsheet, they might end up blowing away all their competition anyway. I'm pretty sure that 1/4 of any big company is dead weight that manages to hang around by looking busy, and the tool of choice of those people is the spreadsheet! They might not be able to get the hang of looking busy and doing nothing on the iPad before they get caught up in the next round of layoffs!

Re:Another moron CEO

[GIL_Dude]

You are absolutely right. In fact, supporting these myriad operating systems and configurations is going to be so hard (things like domain join, security, etc., not to mention versions of productivity software not working due to the plethora of conflicts), that IT isn't going to go in for the BYOD in the way people think. They will just punt and provide VDI sessions for people who BYOD - and that session will be all that is supported.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why you have such things as Enterprise Integration patterns in order to connect seemingly incompatible systems, think Routers, Bridges, Translators, Messaging systems and SOA with UDDI.

1990 called and wants their "incompatible" and "unconnectable" systems back.

Re:Another moron CEO

[thetoadwarrior]

That stuff should be standard so the OS doesn't matter anyway. Why should I need a specific OS to join a domain? Even productivity software should be using open formats to avoid tying yourself to one bit of software. I realise the world generally doesn't work this way but BYOD device is more likely to bring that on than just sticking with what we had before.

Re:Another moron CEO

[pointyhat]

Ah yes where they replaced integration incompatibility with service contract versioning problems and monolithic broker based messaging instead!

I've been through both phases as a solution architect - same turd rolled in different glitter.

Re:Another moron CEO

[N3tRunner]

The idea of BYOD may kill Windows 10, but it's nowhere near the level of acceptance necessary to kill Windows 8. My business won't let *any* outside devices connect to their network for security reasons, and I suspect that they're not at all alone in that respect. Chained-down PCs running whatever the company's acceptable suite of apps may be are still the norm.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, our company went down this route, and what a load of bollocks it is.

I mean, Google docs is okay I guess, but why the fuck are things like strikethrough on the toolbar but not underline? Talk about epic usability fail, and that's before you consider the fact that sometimes it just breaks connection with Google's servers and just outright fucks up.

Even all that's ignoring the fact it's apps are missing a fuckton of everyday features from Office.

Besides, if the OS is now the browser where is my Visual Studio/NetBeans equivalent online? Why would I want a shitty web based equivalent of a terminal services client when I could just fire up a terminal services client?

Even at home web based games are still utter bollocks compared to install desktop games and web based media players still fail to let me access and manage my content in the way I want or offer the features I want. Even GMail well not too bad as web based mail clients go is a poor offering compared to Outlook where managing your mail and calendar is so so much quicker and easier.

Our operating system is now the browser... yeah, if you do nothing of any value whatsoever. Like the GP said, tablets are media consumption devices and nothing more, if that's all you do then sure you can chuck your desktop away, but if you want to do anything useful you better keep it around.

The idea that we've moved to a cloud based mobile world is a fucking joke, trust me. I work for a firm that's heavy on the mobile industry and I see so many daily fails because people have swallowed the bullshit, like the client that bought 100 iPads for their staff to use their new web based CMS with only to find the iPad has no support for the simple image upload functionality prevalent in web browsers - fixed in iOS6, shame their iPad 1s aren't getting iOS6 because Apple no longer support it.

There are some things I believe given time, and improvement mobile/cloud will replace over the next few years, but there are some things I think it will never replace, or at least, not in any near future. But now? cloud/mobile is like a big overhyped alpha test- a nice preview of what's coming, but nowhere near ready for prime time, the desktop has many years left until it is- and as I say, even then there are purposes for which it'll still be essential.

The only reason things like Salesforce have been succesful is because there was no decent quality competing desktop equivalent before it's creation. That isn't true with office software, games, development environments, and so on - good quality desktop software still blows web based and mobile software out the water right now. About the closest option I've seen for replacing any part of Office for example, is LucidChart as a replacement for Visio, and even that's not quite there yet.

Re:Another moron CEO

[jbolden]

Stagnant for decades?

In the 1990s relational databases had just grown powerful enough to take over from the CODASYL / Network databases which allowed for data abstraction and substantially cut development and maintenance costs.
In the 2000s relational database had just grown powerful enough to offer additional levels of abstraction: data warehousing and decision support was mostly non existent.
In the 2010s it appears we are moving to databases 4-5 orders of magnitude larger than those old CODASYL type. A revolution similar to what happened to accounting in the 1960s when computers first took over. This is data analysis which we never expected to have for hundreds of years.

Similarly in areas like networking.

Re:Another moron CEO

[jbolden]

Why should I need a specific OS to join a domain?

Because "joining a doman" is an OS specific way of networking. By having domains a company has already said they don't want OS independent networking but rather what the advantages of an integrated stack of services.

Re:Another moron CEO

[jbolden]

It is unsupportable. There isn't going to be meaningful support. When Microsoft first moved into the enterprise with the Windows for Workgroups. IT didn't concern itself with desktops, they worked on the mainframe system. It was only when crucial data began to be on the desktop applications that the company tasked IT, and BYOD disappeared.

Re:Another moron CEO

[jbolden]

What enterprise do you work for? One without:

BI software that integrates with Excel
Exchange
Sharepoint for document management
No universal communications

etc...

Re:Another moron CEO

[jbolden]

Loses their business clout to whom? Who is even close to providing the range of services Microsoft provides?

As for the Windows 8 interface it is obnoxious for Win32 apps but does quite nicely for Metro application. And Metro is fine for creating content creation application. The change to Windows 8 just drives a change in hardware design that allows for a change in application design.

Re:Another moron CEO

[fermion]

No, MS Windows is irrelevant because people have open standards. Take MS Windows 7. When I put a new USB in it installs a driver and a couple times wanted to reboot. I don't have this issue on my mac. External media, cameras, video, are usable immediately due to open standards. Most any printer can do basic work using a generic driver for PS or HPGL.

In addition to this we have open standard for contacts, email, pictures, web pages. An Apple or Android device is going to leverage those open standards to maximize productivity. MS has traditionally not leveraged those standards.

For the most part people don't care or know if something is OSS. They know if they have to pay for it. I bet a year ago people did not know that Google Maps had to be licensed and was closed. Most people don't know how much a MS WIndows or MS office licensee cost because those costs are hidden. It is often a free part of cheap computer or something gotten through work.

So, yes, given that people are going to bring Chromebooks and Galaxy Tabs and iPads to work, it is an issue if standards are not used. And don't think that MS legacy misbehavior is not an issue. I am still running some web apps that require IE. Telling a new prospective hire that they can't use their tablet is a not a great way to hire the best.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Seeteufel]

Come on, no one uses Sharepoint. BI software ist not based on Excel but based upon a real database feeded by an ERP solution. Everything else is toy stuff. In Europe it is corporate policy in many enterprises to get rid off Microsoft dependencies. Companies are not that passionate about Google dependencies.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Locutus]

the only way I read any validity into what he said was in the context of also using remote computing. I know a few who got off the Microsoft Windows bandwagon and do just fine running virtual machines once in a while locally but do lots of their business work using remote connections into their Windows environments at the office. When BYOD means you have bluetooth input devices at the office or at home and these remote access mechanisms in place there's no need for a local Windows box.

Given the above scenario and the life expectancy of Windows 7, in 5+ years who thinks there won't be even more migrations away from Win32 tied apps to even more cloud based solutions? It does mean that there really would be little need for Windows 8.

Also remember, Microsoft forces their new OS on the retail channels( remember how Vista was forced when nobody wanted it? ) and likes to use those sales numbers showing how many shipped units of Windows X there was for the 1st and 2nd year on the market. Businesses don't buy these new releases so soon so those numbers were always mostly pre-loads at retail. Considering how much the Windows is slowing at the retail channels(notice how poorly OEMs are doing lately?) Microsoft is going to have to pull big numbers of shipped Windows 8 PCs out of their thin air. Not to mention it's not likely home buyers are going to swarm to Windows RT on tablets given they all are running Windows XP, Vista, or 7 now and already have Android or Apple products. I see them picking up a Windows RT device and going 'WTF is this, what else do you have?'.

And then there's the jumping on the Post-PC era bandwagon to help get the message across that things are changing and that's what cloud vendors call marketing.

LoB

Re:Another moron CEO

[jythie]

I would not say 'stagnent', but not moving at anywhere near the speed movies said they would. But in each of those fields I see slow steady progress.

Re:Another moron CEO

[jythie]

One would be far more effective in pointing out other people's lack of perspective if they were not caught in their own little box. There is more to 'work' then spreadsheets and programming, and tablets can be useful too.

Re:Another moron CEO

[jythie]

Which were only able to integrate with themselves and the narrow set of things they set it up for... quickly leading to 'well, we are running X, and it supports B and C, but you are using A which only works with Y and Z'..

Re:Another moron CEO

[Stone316]

We have quite a few iPads at work... Along with Playbooks, iPhones, Android Phones, BB's, etc.

Playbooks are sitting on shelves and never used... I took one home for my daughter after it was on the shelf for 6 months and she barely uses it. So thats saying something. I never see people in meetings with their playbooks.. I do see the scattered person with their ipad. However, the vast majority still come to meetings with their laptops, even tho they have iPads. Myself included. Most of us also have keyboards for them which in my opinion makes them usable for "creating content".

I use my iPad for when i'm sitting around the house and when i'm on call. Its lighter and easier to carry around than my laptop and has a great battery life. I also use it when i'm at a conference to take notes, look things up, etc for the same reasons. If I want to get any real work done tho, I use my laptop/desktop.

I honestly don't see the take up with mobile devices even tho in reality (as you've said) most people don't need a full computer.

Re:Another moron CEO

[besalope]

On the contrary, the fortune 500 company I work at just migrated their entire intranet infrastructure over to a SharePoint 2010 cluster. When you have a need to be able to quickly deploy/manage department-level sites, you cannot beat SharePoint. While I personally hate the software, it is the equivalent to a Windows Domain for ease of management and configuration at an enterprise-level.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Locutus]

yes, Microsoft fooled them all into thinking they had an open system when in fact they were slowly being tied to a single software platform, a single vendor and now to some extent a single hardware definition. Exactly what the entire PC market rallied against in the beginning. Unfortunately those tied into this Microsoft world see all these ways to enable new use cases and computing models as hardships and their only solution is to bring them all back into one Microsoft way via things like VDI. VDI should be the exception and not the rule.

LoB

Re:Another moron CEO

[Locutus]

Because developing software and playing games are what Benioff was talking about? I don't think so. So you mentioned fringe areas where the cloud isn't the answer. Microsoft and their Windows software business can not survive with just that market.

LoB

Re:Another moron CEO

[PCM2]

The daily Microsoft shill still gets +1 Informative? Really?

I mean, Google docs is okay I guess, but why the fuck are things like strikethrough on the toolbar but not underline?

Why? Oh I don't know. Could it be because you're a fucking liar? In Google Docs, underline is right there on the toolbar or you can use Ctrl-U just like any word processor you've ever used since 1985. To get strikethrough, you either have to navigate to the Format pull-downs or press Alt-Shift-5.

Talk about epic usability fail, and that's before you consider the fact that sometimes it just breaks connection with Google's servers and just outright fucks up.

Why should Google be responsible for your crappy network? If your company is going to switch to cloud services, it should be sure its network doesn't fall down all the time.

Even all that's ignoring the fact it's apps are missing a fuckton of everyday features from Office.

Care to name any? I mean, it's obvious that Google Docs does not have all of the features that Office does, but Office is widely regarded to be rather bloated. Not everybody needs all of its features. So I was curious which "everyday" features you were missing.

Yadda yadda yadda, Visual Studio is the best, there's no replacement for Outlook or Visio, yadda yadda iOS is a much more terrible OS than Windows, yadda yadda, yay Microsoft, troll troll yadda yadda... There are so many of these posts on Slashdot these days that I'm surprised you guys still can't spot them.

Re:Another moron CEO

[PCM2]

The majority of youtube videos now created are made on mobile devices

Awesome! I can't wait for the new YouTube Video category at next year's Oscars.

Stick your head in the sand all you want: the sales numbers don't lie. The "traditional PC" sales fell 8% year over year last quarter, a trend that is predicted to accelerate over the next few years.

News flash: Most Americans don't lease a new car every year anymore, either. It must be because they're using mopeds now instead of cars.

Re:Another moron CEO

[jbolden]

The Sharepoint division does $2b a year in sales. It currently is just shy of 150m licenses. So yes people use it.

BI frequently makes use of rich clients and those are often written in Excel (VBA). As far as the analytics, they are often passed off to Excel for responsiveness. Rich client is not dad.

As far as getting rid of Microsoft dependencies, that's may be true. But Munich has been at it for a dozen years without success. It seems like once you have a Microsoft culture the cost of moving off one means that this has to be a high priority, i.e a major business objective. Even mid priority, as IBM , Sun and Oracle a decade ago proved, doesn't cut it.

Re:Another moron CEO

[DarkOx]

Telling a new prospective hire that they can't use their tablet is a not a great way to hire the best.

Wow, that has to be the most out of touch thing I have ever read!

Re:Another moron CEO

[obarthelemy]

Spoken as someone who has never written a major sales proposal, the ones that run 50+, 100+, 200+ pages for multi-million dollar projects. They (at least, mine) include annotated pics and screenshots, a layout with stylesheets, a TOC... and need to look good. And are you assuming the powerpoints materialize out of thin air ?

I'd love for a web app to do what I need in a nice way. Haven't seen anything that comes even close

Re:Another moron CEO

[afgam28]

I have a friend who works for a large bank. He's in charge of developing a new internal application, and the execs insisted that it be an HTML5 app so that it would be compatible with their shiny new iPads. This is quite different from even 5 years ago, where there were lots of native Windows-only corporate applications within the bank and everyone thought this was completely acceptable. You may disagree with their reasoning for moving away from Windows, but regardless, most internal corporate applications are now developed for the web, which is an open platform.

The Windows monopoly existed because even though Mac and Linux could do 80% of what people needed, there was a long tail of Windows-only applications that companies could not move away from. Many of these were custom apps that were written in VB or used some Windows-only technology. Given this, I'd say that he's right. Internal corporate applications these days are almost always web-based, so they're much less locked in to Windows, and so Windows is becoming irrelevant.

Also, you may think that making spreadsheets counts as "real computing", but realize that spreadsheets are only used for small, quick and dirty jobs. Real computing is done by distributed database-driven applications, which these days almost always has a web frontend.

Re:Another moron CEO

[CBravo]

So there are still people being tortured by forcing sharepoint on them? And you have proof? It must be the Iranians and North Koreans.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be the case of austerity during the regression that empowers the drivers of the UI makeover, creating the fantasy of increasing synergy among the bring your own toys, I mean devices and delivering measured components of the value chain from the floor to the C-level, all seamlessly and without blushing. Diversify the portfolio, diversify the risk; consolidate the portfolio, consolidate the risk. The mountain of the markets shall move to Microsoft with a singular word that is the Surface. I have no soul.

Re:Another moron CEO

[dnaumov]

Windows (and, by extension, desktop computing) is irrelevant because people have iPads. Seriously, this guy is completely out of touch.

But it's true. You and I are not the general public and the general public at large does not need Windows PCs, because they do no actual work for which one is truly required. Your argument would apply if people genuinely mostly used their PCs to create things, but this is not the case in reality. Sad, I know, but it's true.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Shill or not, he's partially correct. They key being (as others have said) that tablets are primarily designed as content consumption devices. To do real work in many areas you need something suited for content creation.

Re:Another moron CEO

[Seeteufel]

OK, what are the advantages of Sharepoint?

Re:Another moron CEO

[Seeteufel]

Well Mr. Bolden, I think you get one thing wrong: My original post was about migrating to Win8 which does not make sense for enterprises. Today WinNT, WINXP, VISTA, WIn7 are just fine for enterprises, and MAC and Linux would also do. We are becoming OS-indifferent just as we became browser independent. BI professionals don't use Excel. I know that in certain fields database may mean Access and BI means Excel based solutions and that perfectly makes sense. Fine for me.

Re:Another moron CEO

[lightknight]

But dude, it's going to be okay, they plan on outsourcing IT to the "cloud" when they institute BYOD to work, thus hitting both birds with one stone. It's the "cloud"...it's magic!

Meanwhile, the recently laid-off IT staff will be borrowing from relatives to short their former company's stock, figuring that they can't possibly last 6 months.

Re:Another moron CEO

[zippthorne]

Are you hiring people to play angry birds?

If the work should be done on a tablet, the company should provide the tablet. This allows standardization across your infrastructure, and sends the impression that you support your employees getting your work done for you.

Don't cheap out and refuse to provide a $400 tool to a $80k/year employee just because they might bring it themselves if you do. A professional will bring in his own tools if they're not provided, because he is a professional and cares about getting the job done and done well, but on his own time he might send out a few resumes....

Re:Another moron CEO

[adolf]

Naah, it's not so bad. As long as you get to choose your own adventure.

I spent a few years being IT gunther for a medium company that sells cell phones. Every few weeks, Cell Phone Dept. Lady would bring me a random newfangled device and want to get her email and such on it.

Do you: Make it work (if so, go to 3) or make it not work (go to 7)?

3: Really not so bad. Spend a bit of time understanding the new widget and its quirks, and then just make it work, and then spend a whole lot more time explaining to her how to make it work...... Go to 8.

7: LART the bitch, and then tell her it is impossible. LART again if she complains. It always felt good, and always resulted in more opportunities for additional LARTing. Repeat as useful, but then go back to 3 or go to 10.

8: Convert paycheck into rent and beer. Go to 9.

9: Rejoice in that no matter what else is going on, at least you're not being evicted and you have beer.

10: Find another employer.

Re:Another moron CEO

[tgd]

Why should I need a specific OS to join a domain?

Because "joining a doman" is an OS specific way of networking. By having domains a company has already said they don't want OS independent networking but rather what the advantages of an integrated stack of services.

Strictly speaking, that's not really correct. Joining an active directory domain is just basically some key exchanges, some Kerberos configuration and a few entries in an LDAP directory.

The reason you should have a specific OS is that the entire purpose of joining the domain is centralized management, authentication and authorization. You can join all sorts of devices into an AD domain -- Linux systems can be set up that way. But you're now at the mercy of the security and management of all those other systems.

The reason BYOD from any arbitrary platform is a bad idea is that, as an IT manager, you have absolutely no idea what is going on relative to that system. Your policies won't work if the system is going to ignore them. The group policies you've got mandating things like file encryption won't work.

IT is a hard enough space as it is without adding even more layers of complexity on top.

Re:Another moron CEO

[eionmac]

"Most of us also have keyboards for them which in my opinion makes them usable for "creating content"." with Screen to suit. Other parts are irrelevant (as long as they support these two and suit person) as long as screen and keyboard work work can be done..

Re:Another moron CEO

[jbolden]

Goog point. My thinking is if you have a BYOD infrastructure you need to treat the corporate desktops are untrusted. You don't care if they follow policy because other than services like anti-virus they don't matter. So for example they run client apps but computations are done on the servers. You just pull the infrastructure back like you would if you were serving stuff up on the open internet.

And the day the cloud goes down?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where will he find the information he wanted? Not on his server. Remember, cloud? Not on your hardware. Cheaper for you to set-up and maintain. No control over where your data is, and some one else has easier access to your "encrypted" data, that takes the cake, a pot calling the kettle black. If he was smart, or less dumb, he would have back-ups of the cloud, so he could have everyones data, a super fast computer, to decript the data, make it his and ransome it back to the people who were so stupid as to put their only copy out there.

Re:And the day the cloud goes down?

[NeutronCowboy]

The real question is: is the service provider with whom you store your data more reliable than you or your IT team in providing stable data access? Everything else is just paranoia and habit.

Re:And the day the cloud goes down?

[TheLink]

There's another factor if you're using cloud services for day-to-day operations - internet connectivity uptime.

The cloud service provider could be up, but if your internet connection is down you can't use the services.

In many countries the internet connectivity uptime is worse than internal server uptime when managed by a not too crappy IT team.

It's fine if the cloud services are for public facing operations - in which case the public user's internet connectivity is usually not your problem, they don't blame you if their connection is down.

Re:And the day the cloud goes down?

[pointyhat]

From experience (I used to work for a well known SaaS provider but left when I saw what an absolute state it was all in), the teenager who lives next door to you and plays WoW on his infested laptop is less likely to fuck up then an average SaaS provider. As per any business, their objective is to maximise profit and to do this, they take seriously big risks and hope the hell the string and sticky tape doesn't go snap. When it does, you have no recourse as there are contracts to protect the profit-mongering. Using a "service provider" as you call them is akin to shutting your eyes, sticking your fingers in your ears and taking a whiz.

If you do your own IT in house, you have control over the standards and where your standards are implemented.

Re:And the day the cloud goes down?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cloud won't go down, that's the beauty of this whole plan. The person running The Cloud will just put their data on The Cloud, so it will be self-perpetuating. But what about catastrophic hardware failure scenarios at his "The Cloud" datacenters? There won't BE any datacenters, you fool, the engineers will BYOD which will communicate with The Cloud without the need for LAN's or WAN's by using wireless 4G.

It's Brilliant! It's The Cloud.

(Seriously, read the article. This guy is smoking crack.)

Re:And the day the cloud goes down?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to worry! Soon there will be pico-clouds, letting you run cloud software on your local computer!

Re:And the day the cloud goes down?

[NeutronCowboy]

To put out a counter-point out: I've worked for two SaaS providers, and one where I had direct access to both our internal and the customer application and network information. The vast majority of cases, the issue was with the customer's network and application. In fact, at the first company, our service went down twice: when some moron dug up a fiber cable in Germany, and once when the company running our main data center decided to fuck up their routing table. At the second company, we had one major outage (more than a few hours) when some moron decided to propagate a network change without going through the proper approval process.

Is there spit and duct tape involved? Sure. Then again - that's not the real question. It's whether there's more duct tape and spit in your own organization or not.

From the numbers I saw, overall availability is hanging out 99.9% combined. Now, my laptops, both personal and professional, have already suffered more downtime - whether it is upgrades taking them down, maintenance requiring some amount of trouble-shooting and investigation (damn you Java).

If you do your own IT, you're also stuck with what resources you have. Most companies I know don't prioritize IT. Most people don't prioritize IT. For those, it makes sense to not have everything be in-house. That said, the mantra that you SHOULD put everything onto some outside server is nonsense. Even more so if they tell you that you don't need backups or local copies. If anyone ever tells you that, run screaming in the other direction.

Re:And the day the cloud goes down?

[CBravo]

I work at a SaaS business and I have the complete opposite experience. I have a boss/owner who is in it for the long run. I realize that if our service sucks I need to find another job.

man... feels like christmas

[Anonymous Coward]

spammers going to federal prison, microsoft irrelevant, rightraven screwed... what a fucking cool day in the industry. and it's before 10:00am. WOW.

Re:narrow minded fools

[lennier1]

^^ I yet have to see a tablet that can keep up with twin octocores and a set of Quadros. Then again, that's technology that's used for real work.

regulatory hurdles

[Anonymous Coward]

Until Apple, and Google, or any other alternative device manufacturer actually understands the regulatory environment that all business operates under (and I do mean under), a traditional desktop/laptop experience, even if it is delivered virtually via something like Citrix, will be a requirement. Furthermore, the complete failure of Apple to understand the need to manage assets centrally, without Apple's interference, will keep them in the toy realm. No real business gets done on the iPad, regardless of what you fanbois believe.

Re:regulatory hurdles

[Nerdfest]

Apple completely understands managing resources centrally, they just choose to interpret it as under *their* control.

Win 8 GUI is suffocating

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

More than the absence of the Start button, the Win 8 GUI will suffer from its lack of visual breathing space. Yeah, there's still apparently a nice selection of wallpapers, better than the default you'd get with the OSx, but the Start screen itself suffocates you with its billboard-like tiles.

Win XP had this refreshing image of a rolling green field beneath a blue skiy, the promise of a weekend escape into the country. Now the same office worker looking at the Win 8 start screen will see nothing but the loud artificial colors of the city. Is it that why MS had called it The Metro? Because it resembled those gaudy billboards at a subway station competing for the rush-hour commuter's fleeting attention?

Re:Win 8 GUI is suffocating

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it that why MS had called it The Metro?

No, they call it that because just flat out saying "That's fucking gay" might offend some people.

Re:Win 8 GUI is suffocating

[pointyhat]

This is the typical opinion here I know, but it's all like the doomsayer with the board that reads "the end of the world is nigh" just because it's different. You do a disservice to everyone.

For those of us who have actually used Windows 8 for a bit (i.e. installed it rather than watched someone whinge about it on youtube), you will find a "singularity moment" where you go "holy shit I get this now". It's somewhere between when you're listening to a piece of music you flick open the charms bar and sent it straight to your TV (and it actually fucking works without editing a single config file!) and when it tells you your appointment on the start screen (that you entered on your phone about a minute before) without something modal poking you in the eyeball from the system tray or dredging through a folder of "sync conflicts" trying to find out what happened.

Sorry but it does work, it works wonderfully and is a beautiful thing. If you give it a chance that is...

Re:Win 8 GUI is suffocating

[Anonymous Coward]

you flick open the charms bar

That sounds awesome, I'll be sure to check it out next time I'm in a Harry Potter story.

Re:Win 8 GUI is suffocating

[Anonymous Coward]

You left out the part where you actually had to do real work rather than consume media like a mindless drone.

Re:Win 8 GUI is suffocating

[pointyhat]

Yeah sorry. Here you go: win+d and I'm back to my desktop with visual studio and SQL management studio doing 'real work' as you call it. Same with office. Oh and back to JIRA: no alt tabbing to the window: winkey then type jira and I'm there. Need both? Jira (via ie) gets docked on the right of my second monitor. Its like unity on Ubuntu but not shit.

Re:Win 8 GUI is suffocating

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

"This is the typical opinion here I know, but it's all like the doomsayer with the board that reads "the end of the world is nigh" just because it's different. You do a disservice to everyone."

End of the world, no. There's still Win 7, and for those hapless 3rd World pirates, there's still Win XP. Win 8 is simply, let's just say, off the mark. But one more of this, and it'll be the end of the world. For Microsoft, that is.

Here's another thing about Win 8. It's probably the least future-proof among the major desktop and mobile OS out there. Why? Because it's not the type of OS that you can easily adapt to a VR/AR headset/glasses (ex: Google Glass). Its most important component, the full-size Start Screen, occupies the whole screen, and thus it would block the person or object in front of you. Contrast this with the OSX dock which sits at the bottom of the screen, pretty much like the dashboard of a car.

WRT your comment "without something modal poking you in the eyeball", the Win 8 Start screen is the very definition of modal. It won't poke you in the eye, because it hits you flush, or should I say square, on the face.

Cheers and peace!

Re:Win 8 GUI is suffocating

[adolf]

Spoken as if the Sony Glasstron is something new.

I don't know the interface for Google Glass because I haven't used it myself, but here is my prediction: Whatever the fuck it is that might be useful about it, is not yet useful because operating systems and applications (as we know them) are shit for that sort of interface.

Currently, as it stands, as far as I can tell: It's all shit for VR headsets. It always has been.

Case in point: Why would I want the dock at the bottom of my view? It will cover up the thing that I'm about to step on! (This is the sort of thing that makes me wear contacts instead of glasses, even though glasses can correct more of what is wrong with my vision for less cost: I want to see what it is that I'm about to kick and/or trip over without moving my head.)

This all being the case: Perhaps Windows 8 is perfectly lousy for a direct visual interface. And...so what? Such an interface has been just-around-the-corner for a long, long time. There's no compelling reason to cater to it at this particular moment.

Windows 9

[Tony Isaac]

What Mr. Benioff is forgetting is that Windows 8 is a throw-away version of Windows. Big business is too busy moving to Windows 7 from XP right now, they were going to skip Windows 8 no matter how good or bad it was! Microsoft has a long history of playing catch-up, and then overtaking the competition long after the competition thought they had the game sewed up. Windows 8 may be a colossal dud, but don't count Microsoft out yet.

Re:Windows 9

[modmans2ndcoming]

It will be a dud like Vista...oh wait...Vista was a commercial success...I forgot.

Re:Windows 9

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8 is a superset of Windows 7 (all the Metro stuff and the cloud support) but a lot more optimized version (faster, more secure, modular, more services, etc.). If entreprise can move to 7 then can move to 8, the only difference is the change from the start button to a start full screen.

Re:Windows 9

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has a long history of playing catch-up, and then overtaking the competition long after the competition thought they had the game sewed up. Windows 8 may be a colossal dud, but don't count Microsoft out yet.

So Microsoft is going to "overtake" the web? ra-ra go team!

Re:Windows 9

[Billly Gates]

Then why did it never cross XPs marketshare? MS counted all new pc sales as Vista marketshare even though most just wiped it and put XP on it. Corporations for example make up 50% of the pc market.

Re:Windows 9

[Billly Gates]

The UI is not. Infact Windows 7 is very close to XP and yet users still whined because explorer is so different. SIgh. These users will freak the fuck out and demand a PC with 7 and march to ITs office if they ever did anything so stupid.

It is very radical and productivity would come to a halt. Enterprise is very not warmed up to it even if their new versions of their business apps that run on Win 7 are compatible with Windows 8.

Re:Windows 9

[tftp]

It will be a dud like Vista...oh wait...Vista was a commercial success...I forgot.

"One more such commercial success, and we shall be undone."

Re:Windows 9

[afgam28]

I don't buy this idea that Microsoft would be so reckless as to risk their biggest product like that. The only other version of Windows that has been such a failure is Vista, and when Microsoft released that, they scrambled to push Windows 7 out the door ASAP to stop the backlash. It was an accident, and they're not dumb enough to try to make a corporate strategy out of repeating this accident.

You could argue that Windows Me was their other throwaway version, but when that happened, they had the NT line ready to take over. This time around, they have no such backup strategy ready to go. If Windiows 8 doesn't work out, their only option is a major reversal in strategy and a scramble to release Windows 9 Classic.

It's a bit like New Coke. They're not that dumb, and they're not that smart.

Re:Windows 9

[DogDude]

Big business is too busy moving to Windows 7 from XP right now, they were going to skip Windows 8 no matter how good or bad it was!

Agreed. We're still happily using XP, and when we switch, it'll be to Windows 7. I would never consider running mission critical systems on an OS that hasn't been out and pounded on for at least a few years. This whole insanity of having to have the latest and greatest is largely relegated to the consumer markets. The people with the deep pockets are business buyers, and they do not buy cutting edge because their jobs are on the line.

Re:Windows 9

[cbhacking]

I don't get where this "they scrambled to push Windows 7 out the door ASAP" bullshit keeps coming from. Kids who don't remember anything more than five years back? The time period between Windows Vista's release and Windows 7's release was approximately equal to the time period between Windows 98 SE's release and Windows XP's release. Except, from 98SE to XP, there was also both Windows ME and Windows 2000. From Windows Vista to Windows 7 there was... nothing (well, in the non-server space, which is all I counted for 98-XP too). There was certainly drive to ship Win7, but that's always the case.

In fact, the time from Vista to Win7 is also about the same amount of time as from Win7 to Win8. Obviously, with Win7 being highly successful, MS doesn't *need* a new PC operating system right now, so I hardly imagine you'd say they "rushed" it out in that sense. However, the feature changes from Win7 to Win8 are substantially greater than from Vista to Win7, so in order to finish in about the same amount of time, MS ovbiously had to rush Win8 pretty hard. You can discuss the reasons for that all you like, but "customer dissatisfaction with the previous release" is obviously not the answer.

Re:Windows 9

[modmans2ndcoming]

possibly because XP was on the market for 7 years and vista was on the market for 2.5

It's not the CTO

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the CTO convinced the CEO to not spend any money developing and testing specifically for Windows 8, and that they should put those resources into optimizing the database backend. Makes sense when you're a no-software business.
 
Even if you're a long-time Oracle shop doesn't mean you're exclusive. I would expect a Microsoft shop to know how to use more than Microsoft tools and install Enterprise-class Linux in HyperV.

All within certain predictions

[erroneus]

It has been a long time in evolving this way, but I think it is finally arriving to that point.

The days of the PC are coming to an end. The PC itself will still be around, of course, but it will be relegated to what is should have always been -- a data and service access device.

The thing is that Microsoft really seized into an opportunity by making itself the one main OS. We all watched as Microsoft built its Windows into what we see today. Protocol standards being embraced and extrended all over. The protocols only Windows used being adapted into standards and implemented under Linux. Document formats... most of us have witnessed the unfolding.

But with the web and the push for standards, even Microsoft could not hold off the inevitability. Microsoft wants badly to own and control the standards platforms everyone operates from, but they are developing faster than Microsoft can maintain while at the same time maintain its core products and services.

Microsoft is still very entrenched and they are still playing their strategies hard and will slow the downhill slide as people and business begin to favor and demand support for devices which are not PCs running MS Windows. All Microsoft phones and tablet efforts so far have been rejected and determined to be a failure and all predictions say this will not change. Microsoft is unable to leverage its PC monopoly to grow into other markets as people are generally untrusting of anything with Microsoft on the labels of handhelds and other devices... and if they tried, they will no doubt find themselves back in court.

I find it difficult to imagine anything other than Microsoft shrinking down to its core and waiting for its next opportunity or simply being killed off by the next thing... the next thing which hasn't come around just yet, but it's not hard to imagine some form of Android stepping in.

Re:All within certain predictions

[Anonymous Coward]

None of what you said has anything to do with the article.

This guy is not saying that BYOD will kill anything, he's saying that because of the difficulty of moving to Win8, many shops will actually have a good chance to sit down and consider going with a different platform and IT approach from the ground up. Some shops will buy this guy's "The Cloud" snakeoil, move to BYOD, and find out the hard way that no, 4G will not really eliminate LAN's and WAN's like he claims in the article. Most will not, choosing to either move to Win7 and try to get by in the hopes Win9 comes along in time, or jump to Linux (or other alternatives) and be free from their current vendor lock-in environment.

But to address your post, if Win8 has a chance of really succeeding on any platform, it'll be tablets not workstations. Which kind of shoots your entire argument out of the water if we assume you're right and people move towards mobile devices and abandon workstations.

Re:All within certain predictions

[erroneus]

My argument is that Windows 8, if it can success on tablets and phones, will never stand a chance. The public has already rejected those things due, in large part, to Microsoft's inability to commit to a platform other than PCs running on Intel chips.

EVERY Windows phone has been a failure. EVERY Windows handheld device has been a failure. The market shows very little interest in these devices and "compatibility with PC applications" is pretty low on the public's mind. If Windows8's best hope is in Mobile devices, you might as well start writing your eulogy now.

Re:All within certain predictions

[tftp]

I can put it in different words. Microsoft empire needs money - more and more money every year to continue to look like a company with a bright future. They started well by selling software for PCs when each PC was sold for thousands of dollars. Private deals with major PC makers resulted in inserting MS into the food chain (the MS tax.) MS was able to sell incremental copies of software at zero cost - they didn't even have to copy the bits, OEMs did that for them!

However today computing is no longer a luxury. Computing devices became cheap. If the hardware of your tablet costs $99 you cannot slap a $150 Windows on top of that. Windows blatantly exhaused its food supplies. Sure, it keeps selling Windows, and it will keep doing so for another decade. But in the end if they do nothing they will retrace the steps of Kodak - and of buggy whip makers before that.

As I said, MS empire runs on money. But fewer money is available to them with every new day. The whole concept of Windows is getting old. MS can read the writing on the wall just fine. That's why MS is in panic mode. Win8 is a truly desperate attempt to try and lock up the tablet market. But as usual this is too little and too late. Android is winning in the industry, and iOS is picking up the luxury market. MS has no market left to insert itself into - and they don't seem to have new ideas to make a new market for themselves. The more MS flops the more it distances itself from its customers. Win8, for example, will not be accepted in the enerprise - not now, not ever - simply because Win8 offers nothing of value to engineers and researchers and coders.

The example of Kodak is actually fitting. Kodak lived off of the expensive film and chemistry, where you paid $1 for each printed photo. That was a nice racket while it lasted. But now I can buy a $10 SD card and take thousands of photos onto it - and, look, I can reuse the SD card once I'm done! The whole business model of Kodak collapsed almost overnight. MS's business model is still standing, but it is based only on two cash cows - Windows and Office. And the Office is largely standing on the back of Windows. Sales of PCs to businesses, with Windows, are not threatened - but sales to consumers are not just threatened, they are already against the wall. As businesses defer upgrades for cost reasons (it's not exactly an economic boom out there) MS starts seeing smaller profits, and in 2012 they posted the first loss.

Re:All within certain predictions

[loom_weaver]

That's why I expect Microsoft to bet on the cloud as well. When the only way to get the latest version of Office is to pay a $99 subscription for 1 year then the river money will come back a flowing!

Thanks to the walled garden by Apple and SaaS with SalesForce, Microsoft will happily jump onto the bandwagon.

Re:All within certain predictions

[cbhacking]

Actually, back when it was called PocketPC, and then the early versions of Windows Mobile, WinCE-based phones were pretty popular (for PDAs and smartphones, i.e. mobile computer devices, of the day). They were extremely business-oriented, competing with Blackberry and the like, but they existed and actually had a quite substantial piece of the (admittedly small) market.

It was definitely a failure on Microsoft's part to not realize that smartphones now could and should be built as consumer-oriented devices and marketed to the general public. They spent a good while trying to turn their existing Windows Mobile business in that direction once they realized it was possible, but by the time they finally got into the game for real, it was definitely too late for what they could offer. For a smaller company,t hat would have meant death. For Microsoft, it meant some hard quarters financially, but they have both the cash and the technical skill to keep trying until they succeed. WP7 may have been the world's biggest OS beta test, but it achieved its purposes: it established that Microsoft was once again focusing on smartphones instead of stagnating as they did for years, and it earned mindshare even if not marketshare. There's a lot of talk about things like the Lumia 920, even though there isn't even any advertising for it yet, and it's that and the other WP8 devices that MS is really aiming at to try taking back the marketshare that they once had.

I wouldn't bet against them. The original Xbox was a similar failure from a financial standpoint, but the 360 has been highly successful even if it hasn't made money for MS, just because it has established MS as a firm player in that market. WP8 on phones, and Win8 / Windows RT on tablets, is setting up to be Microsoft's Xbox 360 in the mobile space. It still might not make money there, but its goal is to earn marketshare regardless.

Re:narrow minded fools

[Anonymous Coward]

^^ I yet have to see a tablet that can keep up with twin octocores and a set of Quadros. Then again, that's technology that's used for real work.

I have yet to see where Salesforce requires twin octocores and a set of Quadros, so from his (limited) perspective, his product will work just fine on a tablet.

And as your sales staff will be quick to remind you, it takes sales to create "real work"...all parts and pieces of the same corporate puzzle.

All hail the new pay as you breathe model

[pointyhat]

Salesforce don't like the whole pay for it once and keep it model. They like the pay once a month (SaaS) model. They are also pretty shitty at giving data back when you want it. You can have it but it's a bastard to get it out.

BYOD + Salesforce is a wet dream for them which is why they're spinning it like this.

Unfortunately, a blanket statement here: It's just a 100% fucking retarded model that needs to go to hell.

You no longer have control over your data (lock in, data protection, availability, regulatory requirements).

You can't access it reliably *all of the time* (network issues, "cloud" outages).

You don't always know where your data is (Data protection issues).

You purchase purely a portal device rather than a general purpose computer (control, availability).

Your support sucks (availability).

At the end of the day, your cost cutting results in loss of your data, poor availability, data protection issues and legal exposure. Also do you want your clap-infested users' devices plugged into your network, authenticating against your web applications? Are you sure your business can handle all that?

I'd take Windows 8 (not RT) with local storage over the above any day and put it in a corporate environment. Hell, I'd even buy an Oracle license over it.

Re:All hail the new pay as you breathe model

[hutsell]

Salesforce don't like the whole pay for it once and keep it model. They like the pay once a month (SaaS) model. They are also pretty shitty at giving data back when you want it. You can have it but it's a bastard to get it out. [...]

The so called Cloud could be useful, if the technology doesn't abuse the internet with an all or nothing mindset. However, since it's the business world's gold rush drooling dream of revenue streams to end all revenue streams, another "pay as you breathe model" worth mentioning is the time share.

Everyone in other places outside the office could have access to a computer; a mainframe with their dumb terminal. It's awesome--as the video will explains. (Warning. With all due respect to everyone from that era and putting nostalgia aside, this video is done in the classic dated laugh-out-loud old school style.)

Re:All hail the new pay as you breathe model

[jimicus]

Compared with an individual PC and a copy of Office, I'd agree that SaaS is a "pay as you breathe" model. But that's not where it becomes interesting.

Where it becomes interesting is if you're looking for industry-specific software. This quite often costs four or five figures for even a relatively small business and can come with annual maintenance costs that you pretty much have to pay whether you want to or not.

That's a lot of money to find once a year. But your customers don't pay in one big lump once a year. So paying a monthly fee - even if that monthly fee works out slightly dearer - often makes far more business sense.

Re:All hail the new pay as you breathe model

[mounthood]

Salesforce don't like the whole pay for it once and keep it model. They like the pay once a month (SaaS) model. They are also pretty shitty at giving data back when you want it. You can have it but it's a bastard to get it out.

Salesforce makes SQL access difficult (or impossible). They can switch to Postgres without changing their web platform and then open the DBs for reporting, read replication, and sell write access. SQL is still the power-tool of enterprise integration.

Re:All hail the new pay as you breathe model

[PCM2]

Similar economics apply to desktop software. Say an upgrade to the new version of Office costs $300. Ramping up a department of 100 workers, each with a copy of Office, would cost you $30,000. For a small business, that might actually force you to make a decision: Do we upgrade our software this quarter or do we install that new lighting we've been talking about? A subscription model might actually look attractive to you in that case, too -- which may be one reason why Microsoft is now offering Office in a subscription model (and Adobe is doing the same with Photoshop, etc.)

Re:All hail the new pay as you breathe model

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar economics apply to desktop software. Say an upgrade to the new version of Office costs $300. Ramping up a department of 100 workers, each with a copy of Office, would cost you $30,000. For a small business, that might actually force you to make a decision: Do we upgrade our software this quarter or do we install that new lighting we've been talking about? A subscription model might actually look attractive to you in that case, too -- which may be one reason why Microsoft is now offering Office in a subscription model (and Adobe is doing the same with Photoshop, etc.)

If you host your own local copy of the software on each machine, and your business doesn't rely on any features in the new version, then not upgrading would save you $30000.

For a small business, being in a subscription-based model is what forces you to make the decision years in advance - you can't install the new lighting, because there's no money in the budget. There's no money in the budget because some cloudstruck fuckwit in the IT department pre-purchased the "upgrade" (that doesn't deliver any business-essential functionality not already present in the old version, but carries with it the training costs of getting the employees up to speed) four years ago when he went on the subscription plan.

If you're in the software business, it kinda sucks, you're forced to take the upgrades because you don't know which of your customers will require them, so you always have to develop for the "latest and greatest"

But a small business with 100 MSOffice seats, who use it only for word processing and spreadsheets, could get by just fine using Office 97 and not paying a penny for upgrades for 15 years. (I seem to recall that Office 97 works fine under XP, so if all your old crufty hardware has finally died, just throw XP SP3 in a VM, give the VM 2GB of RAM, and reinstall from the original install media. I'll bet it runs faster in a VM on modern hardware than it did on the original hardware!)

Re:All hail the new pay as you breathe model

[Zemplar]

Salesforce don't like the whole pay for it once and keep it model. They like the pay once a month (SaaS) model. They are also pretty shitty at giving data back when you want it. You can have it but it's a bastard to get it out.

Salesforce makes SQL access difficult (or impossible). They can switch to Postgres without changing their web platform and then open the DBs for reporting, read replication, and sell write access. SQL is still the power-tool of enterprise integration.

False. Salesforce has one of, if not the best, API for any cloud solution. Using their API, SOQL (not pure SQL) is easy and straight forward.

I'm not affiliated with Salesforce, other than a delighted customer where my company of 20k employees utilize their service. In fact, I've personally developed SQL table replication* using SOQL, and it isn't that hard.

* Not "true" database replication, but functionally the same.

Re:All hail the new pay as you breathe model

[mounthood]

* Not "true" database replication, but functionally the same.

With Postgres it can be plain old SQL not some variant that has to be custom built for each table/DB (and which changes per SaaS platform).

Trying to replicate all the tables in all the DBs would be a huge pain, not to mention slower and development intensive, compared to true DB replication.

Re:All hail the new pay as you breathe model

[pointyhat]

That is a good thing. They don't tie their implementation to their external contracts and API. That's application architecture 101. Exposing SQL is death by coupling.

BYOD is a joke

[lucm]

For years analysts have scared the good IT folks with their prediction of BYOD. But the reality is that BYOD does not take off. It's in the "trend that never happened" category, along with VDI and generalized telecommute.

If Apple had any long-term vision, instead of raping its existing customer base with new adapters for an existing product line they would pony up the pocket change needed to buy RIM at the moment and they would get in the enterprise world by the front door, because the number of companies that move (and stick) to BYOD instead of having a standard device (or series of devices) is a drop in the bucket.

Anyways giving any kind of value to predictions from some dude at Salesforces.com is like asking people at Nokia where the mobile industry is going.

Re:BYOD is a joke

[jbolden]

But the reality is that BYOD does not take off

BYOD did take off. In 2008 Macs were used in a tiny percentage of companies outside of artistic departments. Today something like 30% have to support Mac. In 2008 companies had RIM smartphones that were centrally purchased. Today they have iPhones and Android often bought with subsidy. In 2008 companies that had tablets had specialized ones. Today over 20% of all companies have to support iPad in a semi-official way.

As for Apple, Apple doesn't want to be an enterprise vendor. They don't want the business.

Re:BYOD is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

At my company we're building our application delivery model to work from anywhere on any device. You could run on a tablet, phone, computer running any OS. Thanks to Citrix.

Re:BYOD is a joke

[lucm]

At my company we're building our application delivery model to work from anywhere on any device. You could run on a tablet, phone, computer running any OS. Thanks to Citrix.

Is it in production? If not, your company is in that interesting situation of building today products according to yesterday's vision of tomorrow.

Re:BYOD is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Today something like 30% have to support Mac.

Enterprises don't "support" Mac or Android or FreeBSD. They provide a Citrix session into an MS Windows desktop and they support the functions therein.

It's up to the employee to install the appropriate client software to access that service

Re:BYOD is a joke

[jbolden]

That's not universally the case. Some of them have put a more sophisticated Active Directory client out there so that Macs can connect. Many of them have made services which available to desktops at the UNIX level, which allows Macs to connect. Many of them provide instructions for employees on how to use Macs to do various things.

To a lesser extent this is true of Android, iOS.

funny

[Anonymous Coward]

im about to go buy a top end desktop cause i have use of it, a mobile device cant do what i want...and be upgradeable and a ton of other stuff....OH ya im hte guy that makes stuff and might make a buck , go on suckers keep buying....there crud lies

In the words of the great Bender...

[rebelwarlock]

Who are you and why should I care?

The smartphone & tablet bubble

[evilviper]

Enjoy the smartphone & tablet bubble while it lasts, but CYA because you never know when it'll come suddenly crashing down. Over night, Apple will go from the king of all companies, to one that is painfully obviously over-valued with stock prices in a decline that seems like it won't ever end. And analysts will rant on about how obvious it was that Apple's non-diversified monoculture was such a bad idea, and claim they said so, before.

That's not to say smartphones or tablets will be going away... just that there's room and money for everyone ONLY while the segment is expanding like crazy. As soon as that growth even slows, the crunch will be sudden and extremely painful, as companies fall daily, and all the hype that helped keep accelerating the bubble suddenly does a 180 and fuels the crash even more quickly. And let's not forget, that the guys left for dead during the bubble will be revered by the business community for their stable strategy that didn't jump headlong into the hype.

Of course there will be plenty of cheap hardware at fire-sale prices to play with, for quite a while. And soon, the world will be restored to a much more sane place, where the distortion of the previous bubble is forgotten, and some other bubble starts growing.

Re:The smartphone & tablet bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy the smartphone & tablet bubble while it lasts, but CYA because you never know when it'll come suddenly crashing down.

Research In Motion is in the death throws with its BlackBerry smartphones and tablets due to its inability to adapt and its decision to chase the consumer market. The final chapter will be written in 2013 when the oft delayed BlackBerry 10 is now alleged to be released. The personal computer (PC) was a historical accident at the expense of a vibrant and diverse plethora of home/hobbyist computer offerings. The smartphone and tablet will follow a similar trajectory before their decline. As we move into the twenty-first century there is a growing movement towards a client-server-centric architecture now called "the cloud."

Re:The smartphone & tablet bubble

[gmhowell]

There are many financial tools that will let you back up your rhetoric with cold, hard cash. I am curious about which one(s) you are taking advantage of in light of your contrarian views of the market.

Re:The smartphone & tablet bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many here that realize you're nothing but a moronic troll george m. howell.

Re:narrow minded fools

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but sales is a one time event. It's the support team/engineers/subcontractors/employees that create "real work" and keep said work. They are the people that keep the customer happy. They are the people that work with the true "customer". Once again the customer is the employees at the other company that need the people at your company that provide the service you are trying to sell. They don't need you. A salesman can only keep the CEO/big cheese happy with wining/dining/golf/gifts. A one time event. It doesn't take sales to create "real work". That work is self perpetuating after your one time event if you sold the product truthfully in the first place and if you even needed to do the selling. Your products and services will sell themselves, or at least they should. That said, word of mouth amongst companies is far greater than anything you can pitch. If you are known for crap products/services, sales will never be able to make up for it, at least not in the long term. Sales should be about taking customers away from someone else because of the people that do the "real work", not because you can spend more on a potential client. Lose the ego, you'll go further.

BYOD actually makes Windows relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it humorous that Marc mentions BYOD making Microsoft irrelevant. This is not true...it only makes the end point device agnostic. Using a product such as Citrix Xendesktop makes it possible to remotely connect (WAN and/or LAN) to a WIndows 7 virtual desktop from any device. From the end point, this works for Linux, Windows, Mac, Chromebook, smartphones and tablets. So despite the additional choices on the end point, you would still be running Windows 7 desktops and Windows Servers to support the infrastructure.

takes time

[Vince6791]

I used windows 8 preview and basically same performance wise as windows 7, but I haven't tried out the RTM so now I really can't judge it. If you don't want to switch back and forth between the metroUI just install the start menu button for free. Only time will tell if windows 8 will be any useful on the Desktop. Vista was not that bad and a lot more stable than windows xp but you did have to disable some services to speed things up.

BYOD, oh good!

[Velex]

Oh good! BYOD! Does that mean that the user who's bringing her own device is now responsible for understanding how it works, and does that mean that she's responsible for taking care of her own crapware that she installs on her own device so she can learn 1 weird old trick instead of me?

Re:-1 paid chill

[pointyhat]

Certainly not a shill. I mean you could be a paid shill from apple couldn't you? I just rather like it because for once they managed to make windows work properly. I've been plagued for years with shit that doesn't work from Microsoft. This just ain't one of those things, which to be honest surprises the crap out of me. CP was a turd but RTM with the recent app updates is spot on. Bear in mind I'm running it on proper kit (Sony 22" AIO touch screen).

The Desktop still works

[Anonymous Coward]

Move the Win8 desktop tile to the upper left hand corner of the Start screen. Hit the Enter keyboard button from now on when restarting and the Startscreen shows up. You go direct to the desktop and can get your ass back to work instead of playing with the stupid tiles.

It makes sense for sales reps

[Animats]

This makes sense for sales reps. Their job is to talk to people and convince them to buy. Maybe take the actual order. That doesn't require much input or local computing power, but it requires convenient access to catalog and customer data. This is a business application that maps well to small screen mobile devices.

Re:narrow minded fools

[PCM2]

Sorry, but sales is a one time event. It's the support team/engineers/subcontractors/employees that create "real work" and keep said work.

GP's point is that Marc Benioff doesn't sell software for those people, so why should he care?

CEO = X

[Anonymous Coward]

All he's saying is, "It's the browser, stupid!"

Perhaps he just wants them all to understand that if Windows 8 turns out to be a disaster, his clientele will still be able to access their database, regardless of the any problems they might encounter with the 'updated' look & feel, functionality or hoop navigating that IT will have to do in order the deal with the arbitrary changes Microsoft determines their customers must endure.

A CEO's job includes promoting the interests of its company. I'm not sure why the Salesforce.com CEO thinks its in the best interest of the company he represents to disparage Microsoft just because it's apparent that access to Salesforce is independent of the OS. I'll wager that most of the people that make the decision to use Salesforce still use Windows at their desk.

I guess all the Salesforce employees use Linux, right?

Benioff is an idiot....

[erp_consultant]

Windows is going to be the dominant operating system in the corporate setting for many years to come. Yes, people will have their little smart phones and tablets but they cannot replace the power of a desktop computer - at least not today. I see people in meetings smugly walking in with their iPads only to quickly fumble trying to take notes on the thing. It's fine for looking at stuff, not so good for creating stuff.

Benioff takes a jab at Ellison every chance he gets. Can't say I blame him because Ellison may be one of the few people that's a bigger jackass than Benioff is - and that's saying a lot.

What people need to remember about Salesforce is that CRM is not a mission critical application. That's why it works ok on a cloud architecture. If there is an outage it's not the end of the world. Now imagine putting your whole Financials or Supply Chain system on a cloud based system and there is an outage or a security breach. You're fucked. Short story - cloud works for some stuff and not others.

Benioff - shut up and get back on your Segway and stick your thumb back up your ass where it belongs.

Snore!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, thank you, we know. I can't believe how much CEOs get paid for stating the obvious.

best way to kill OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

buy out the developers..

Year of Postgres on the Server?

[Compaqt]

Is this Postgres's coming-out year?

Talking about multiversion concurrency is a sure way to lose your audience.

Much better to be able to just say "Salesforce.com uses it". Answers all questions, and vaults it up to the level of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM".

Not to mention all the enterprisey changes which I suppose we could expect to Postgres.

Guess that would apply to OSX and Linux as well

[elabs]

If his argument is to be believed then all desktop OS's would be irrelevant with the new BYOD trend. I don't believe it for a second. I highly doubt that my Windows Phone or Surface (let alone an iPad) is going to run Matlab, Maple, Visual Studio, Eclipse or any other massive engineering suite any time soon.

wtf does sf know about os tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because everyone knows salesforce.com is completely relevant to OS technology. :|