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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."
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.
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
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 :)