Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, posted an article on Techcrunch today titled “The Facebook Imperative“. In it he writes about what drove him to found Salesforce.com:
I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?”
More than a decade after Benioff asked himself this question, it is still timely. Why is so much enterprise software ugly and difficult to use?
In the article, Benioff asks a new question: Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?
Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time.
To address this, Salesforce has launched Chatter, a “realtime collaboration platform”.
Salesforce’s Chatter reminds me of an IBM commercial where an executive with magical powers can see into the future. When his colleagues excitedly ask him what he sees, he replies dreamily:
“Everything is integrated”.
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