By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Frank Sinatra's underrated 1960 album Nice
‘n’ Easy. Just a warning, readers should probably prepare for a good bit of
ol’ Blue Eyes this week, First CoffeeSM’s finally caught a bit of
why so many people proclaim him the greatest singer of popular song of the 20th
century:
Thanks to
salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff for taking the time, between
travels to Costa Rica and parts unknown, to answer some questions.
Hi Marc, thanks for taking
the time to talk with us. Tell us what pleased you about the public reaction to
the Appforce vision, and what you think people still don’t “get” about it.
When you introduce
as idea as big as the AppExchange, you know that you are going to have to be
patient – a concept this big won’t sink in overnight. Yet the uptake has been
overwhelming. So many customers have come up to us, eager to upload apps. And
developers are blown away at how quickly they can bring their products to
market. Everybody is blown away at how this expands opportunities around our
applications.
And yet we are
still beginning. We think AppForce and the AppExchange are changing the way
applications are developed, distributed, and deployed. And along the way, we
are going to change the very idea of who can be a developer. By democratizing
the tools and the distribution, we are unleashing what we believe will be a new
generation of creativity and innovation.
What’s the best music
to listen to at work?
I keep a collection
of ukuleles in one of my home offices, so I am fairly partial to Hawaiian
music.
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer recently
said they were going to give salesforce.com a run for their money. Sweating bullets
yet?
Microsoft has
really let this industry and its customers down. Where is the innovation? While
we are preparing to release the 19th generation of our on-demand
service, they are struggling to release their second. And this is true across
many product areas that are popular with businesses and consumers today. Google,
RIM, eBay and Apple all thrive today because Microsoft has failed to
innovate.
In some ways it sounds
like salesforce.com is interested in moving beyond not only software, but CRM
itself, to bigger stages. Over the next five years how will salesforce.com’s
priorities for what you guys actually make and sell evolve?
We are following
the call of the customer. That’s a major advantage of being an on-demand
service provider. You really can understand exactly how customers are using the
applications and platform, and you can easily see where you need to go. And
customers are telling us that they want to take the success that they have
achieved in salesforce automation and extend it throughout the enterprise.
So
we are going to continue to improve our products so that our customers can take
our application to places that we can’t even imagine. The AppExchange is going
to be a major leap forward in that.
Spiritual integrity is
a big priority for you, that a person’s life works together in harmony, and no
important parts, such as giving back, are left out. Is it too much of a stretch
to see this same belief in what Appforce wants to do for business applications
– let each individual or business find their own “fulfillment” or “harmony”
without leaving any important parts out?
That’s an
interesting concept. I think that the ultimate goal here is that when a
customer uses our application, they see their business reflected accurately in
it. One of our customers said it best: “Why should I change my business to suit
my software?” We completely agree.
Appforce was built, as you’ve said, on the eBay, the iPod
model. It’s a great model – but what limitations in that did you see that
you’ve structured Appforce to overcome? In other words, where is Appforce
improving on that basic model?
I think that we are
all going to learn from each other here. Ebay and Apple have pioneered some
amazing consumer to consumer and business to consumer models. Now we are
talking about a business to business model that combines the strengths of both.
And as always, our customers will be very clear about telling us what they like
and what they don’t.
A few years ago people
were writing about UpShot and MyNetSales as your competitors, these days it’s
RightNow or NetSales or Siebel OnDemand. What’s the next level of competition
you’re looking forward to?
I recall that back
in the mid-90s, Andy Grove was asked a similar question about the
microprocessor market. And he considered the “competition” the millions of
people who hadn’t bought a PC yet. I think the same can be said for on-demand,
and we are clearly in the early days. There are still many companies who
haven’t investigated the benefits of this model. So that’s really where we have
our sights set.
Do you believe that
great athletes, great competitors need a great rival to push them to their
utmost, and do you think salesforce.com has that these days?
A few years ago, I
would have said Siebel. In our early days, it was certainly useful to have a
rival that had such a negative reputation with customers. But the sun has set
on that company now, and the lessons loom large for all enterprise software
companies: ignore your customer at your own peril.
With Appforce are you
worried more about competitors developing a better mousetrap, like Google did
to the other search engines, or that the idea simply won’t catch on the way
you’re betting it will?
Arrogance is the
Achilles’ heel for any company, particularly in technology. So we are going to
be relentless in our pace of innovation. I think a major factor in our favor is
that we have democratized the tools and opened up the platform so that our
customers can take advantage of the incredible creativity of our community.
…
Is this as, well, slightly creepy to anyone else as it is to
First CoffeeSM?
A recently-released study called the Speech Recognition Insights Report
found that almost three out of four
Britons “are now talking to machines on a regular basis” for such tasks as
paying gas or electric bills, inquiring about bank balances, booking train and
coach tickets, and even ordering pizza.
Hey First CoffeeSM’s all for voice recognition
technology, no Luddites here, keep the technological innovations hummin’, that’s
what we say, but… three-fourths of all Brits talk to machines on a “regular
basis?” Seems a bit much, what?
But what’s really interesting is that the report, sponsored by speech
recognition vendors Fluency Voice Technology and Call Centre Focus magazine, looked at the voices that best suited
different sectors. It found that voices conveying “efficiency, reliability,
intelligence, credibility, calmness and being straight to the point” are
considered the most desirable for a company.
The most popular voice chosen from a given sample for the travel sector is an
age 30's woman with a “London Estuary English” accent, whatever that is, which
those surveyed took to be “competent, well paced and professional.” For retail
substitute 50s for 30s in age, and for utilities interactions the preferred
voice is a 20-year old woman with a “strong, husky and independent” tone to her
voice.
However, in financial services, the most desired sound is
that of a 30s man with – for whatever reason – an Irish accent, conveying a “warm, smooth and authoritative” feel.
Oh, and for travel companies, the survey said one of the most desirable
celebrity voices – evidently they do that in Britain – is that of Michael
Palin, a former Monty Python who has since made a career out of going to weird
places and telling others about them.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.