jennell2jenson: Salesforce CEO Benioff Praises Ozzie, Pokes Microsoft

Monday, December 20, 2010

Salesforce CEO Benioff Praises Ozzie, Pokes Microsoft

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff issued some high praise for Ray Ozzie during his Oct. 19 keynote talk at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2010 in Orlando, Fla. Calling Ozzie "one of the great leaders of the industry," he described the departing Microsoft executive's work on Lotus Notes as "pioneering."

That being said, Benioff couldn't resist using Ozzie's resignation to poke at his rival. "Happened much faster than a Microsoft upgrade, that's what I'm saying," he told the audience, to laughter.

Microsoft's "all in" cloud strategy in some aspects threatens Salesforce.com's customer base and SaaS (software-as-a-service) model. Earlier in the year, the two companies also fired tit-for-tat patent-infringement lawsuits against each other, a fracas in which Benioff compared Microsoft to "alley thugs." Despite the mutual accusations of intellectual-property violation, Salesforce eventually agreed to compensate Microsoft for its patents.

But Benioff is enamored of what he calls "Cloud 2," the evolution of the cloud into a more mobile- and social-networking-centric form, and sees Microsoft--in fact, many of the country's larger tech companies--as more emblematic of an outdated paradigm. Salesforce recently unveiled Chatter 2, the next version of its Chatter collaboration platform, which allows employees to post comments and share files in a Facebook-style environment.

"Groupware, collaboration, LotusNotes--I love it, but it was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg," Benioff told the audience during his keynote. "I've been using this for like 20 years ... and then we have this kid who has 500 million users going on a billion. Can we learn something from that?"

The thing is, Ozzie seemed to have learned from the rise of social networking. As Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, he pushed initiatives such as FUSE Labs, a unit focused on software related to social connectivity, real-time experiences and rich media.

One of the products out of FUSE Labs, Docs.com, allows Facebook users to create and share Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents with .PDF support and full-text search.

Microsoft may be pushing an "all in" cloud strategy--look no further than this week's Office 365 announcement for evidence of that--but the company still has to shift its corporate mindset to wholly embrace that evolving vision. Ozzie was a figurehead of that cloud-centric evolution. Now Microsoft needs another one.