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: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

[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.

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: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.

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.

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.