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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."
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.
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).
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
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.
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.