Salesforce.com's Benioff Disses Windows 8, Oracle 182
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."
Another moron CEO (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows (and, by extension, desktop computing) is irrelevant because people have iPads. Seriously, this guy is completely out of touch. It may be great for the CEO who never has to do any real work with a computer, but an iPad is wholly unsuitable for anything other than Angry Birds and checking your Facebook. It's a media consumption device, not something used to create and manipulate spreadsheets. The fact that "Windows is irrelevant" because of "the cloud" speaks to his complete misunderstanding of the technology.
Re:Another moron CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 9 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Another moron CEO (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:And the day the cloud goes down? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Another moron CEO (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Another moron CEO (Score:4, Insightful)
The smartphone & tablet bubble (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah well... (Score:4, Insightful)
You make a lot of bold claims there, but they are obviously controversial and you haven't cited any actual data to back them up.
For example, why do you think AMD has only months left? They made a loss in Q3 and they're cutting their workforce, but they still took over $1B in revenues and have over 10,000 employees. That's almost certainly enough scale to survive a bad year or two while they reposition, which is exactly what their CEO said they would be doing on their Q3 call.
And I don't buy your argument about tablets replacing PCs at all. Tablets serve very well as a convenient portable information consumption device. For households that don't have any greater needs than that, sure, maybe they can do without a PC. But anyone who is doing anything creative is going to need way more capabilities than any tablet offers. That includes almost all business use and anyone who likes to send messages that don't fit in a txt msg or tweet, just to name two obvious and huge groups where tablets have no chance of replacing PCs. In short, saying tablets will make PCs obsolete would be like saying cell phones or games consoles would make PCs obsolete. Those things didn't happen, because we're talking about different tools for different jobs.
For the same reason, trying to push UI paradigms that have been reasonably successful on small, primarily consumption-based mobile devices onto a general purpose PC that is also used for creative work seems like a poorly thought-out idea to me. Between that and the evidence from Vista that people won't upgrade to a new version of Windows just because it's the new version of Windows any more, I'm skeptical about the course Microsoft seems to be charting with Windows 8.