Marc Benioff: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle are dead meat

Marc Benioff gave a talk at the GigaOm Structure conference today. He's never shy of giving his opinions.

He mentioned that he was talking to his
friend, Craig Mundie, a Microsoft executive, at the World Economic
Forum this year. Marc mentioned that his company, cloud computing
leader Salesforce.com, has over 77,300 customers now. Just to show
how efficient cloud computing is, he asked Craig how many servers
77,000 Microsoft customers would require. Craig figured each company
would need at least one, and some a couple more, so guessed at least
100,000.

Benioff boasted that Salesforce.com has
only 3,000 servers (Dell computers) to run all those companies' needs
– and that half of them are not even turned on. The other half are
to handle peak demand. Ouch.

“The Microsofts and IBMs of the world
are just going away” because they can't wean themselves from
selling software, rather than renting it out in the cloud, he said.
“CIOs want change,” he says. “They're demanding it. They're
finally deciding they don't want the same old stuff. They're looking
to Google, to Amazon, to us.” And his final dig: “That's why
Microsoft's stock has been flat for the last ten years.”

Conference organizer Om Malik asked
what he thought about Oracle's boast that it is now into cloud
computing. He pointed to Oracle's “Iron Man” ads, with the
slogan, “Software, hardware, complete.” (Oracle recently bought
Sun Microsystems for its server hardware.) “That's their strategy,”
he says. “Sell you more software, sell you more hardware.”

That's not cloud computing. “Our
strategy is to sell you no hardware or software,” he said. Cloud
computing has to be at least an order of magnitude cheaper to be
considered “real” cloud computing, he added. Otherwise, why
bother? That's the difference between real cloud computing and “the
false cloud.”

To illustrate the difference, he
mentioned a recent trip to Japan where he attended a conference.
Japanese companies are not on the cloud yet. One company with a huge
display was boasting on enormous banners that it is offering cloud
computing. So he took his translator to the booth and asked to see
their approach to the cloud. He was shown a rack with a lot of
hardware and software on it. How is that cloud computing? Benioff
asked. The response: Well, we can put the rack in your facilities, or
in ours, or in someone else's!

So Benioff came up with the idea of
talking about “the false cloud” to illustrate that a lot of
companies claiming clouds are just wrong.

What's the next step in the cloud?
Mobility and social networking. “Why isn't all enterprise software
like FaceBook,” which has a billion users? Now that's efficiency.
He calls it “Cloud Two.” To that end, he says Salesforce.com is
rewriting its software platform, its applications, its call centers
and more to incorporate mobile capability and social networks into
the system. “This is going to create more value and capability than
Cloud One,” he said. “We have to transform, and we're working on
that.”

The new technology for social
networking at Salesforce.com is called “Chatter,” described as
“The real-time Collaboration Cloud.” The status of important
projects and deals are automatically pushed to you – kind of like
email alerts from FaceBook, I guess. The Web site says “Updates on
people, groups, documents, and your application data come straight to
you in real-time feeds.”

Sounds great. My question is, can he
keep out the spam?

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