Beating Bill Gates at his own game

[mazzy]

Earlier this week, I attended a Salesforce.com event at the tony Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco, where CEO Marc Benioff previewed once again the forthcoming June 8 edition of his company's products and showcased Sforce 6.0.

Clearly, Salesforce.com wants to become more of a development platform for business and enterprise resource planning, or ERP, applications. So how will Benioff manage that transition? In a brief on-camera interview, I asked what he views as Salesforce's biggest challenge--a question that's particularly au courant, given the company's now operating in an area that's traditionally been dominated by the likes of Microsoft, Oracle (plus PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards) and SAP for decades.

Benioff talked about delivering an on-demand platform, including tools, applications and user interfaces to access information. In particular, he said, Microsoft was trapped in a failed client-server model that may have been great in the early 1990s, but not the 21st century.

Off camera, Benioff continued to castigate Microsoft for failing to deliver on the next wave of innovation. Actually, I don't know why he isn't thanking Microsoft for being half-asleep at the wheel. He owes part of his good fortune to the fact that Microsoft's been too busy trying to do too many things at once--including its draining and sundry legal battles.

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