Salesforce.com throws doubts on Microsoft strategy
David Kirkpatrick of Fortune writes that Salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff, was approached in 2000 by Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer about buying the “software as a service” company. However, Ballmer was held up by others at Redmond who felt it would detract from the Windows/Office/Server software-in-the-box core business.
That view reflects the question this blog has asked about recent announcements : can Microsoft manage two overlapping approaches to software, or is there a danger of falling between the two stools?
“It’s fine to announce something,” [Benioff] says, “but where is their advantage in this situation? They’re saying now they’ll have advertising in Excel. That’s their innovation? Where do they say it will be better or cheaper than everyone else?” Benioff says Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer visited him in San Francisco in 2000 to discuss buying Salesforce.com, but that Ballmer was dissuaded by others inside Microsoft who believed that software as a service wouldn’t allow the company to “pull through” its other products. “Microsoft’s whole strategy,” says Benioff, “is based on pulling through, starting with Windows and pulling through everything else ~ Office and all its products for servers.” (Microsoft declined to comment on Benioff’s remarks.)
Kirkpatrick continues : “Benioff noted that while Microsoft is still nowhere near offering genuine hosted versions of its signature Office applications, others are way ahead of them—Writely.com has a Word alternative; Numsum.com looks like Excel; and perhaps most impressively, Goffice is a full suite of business applications available as an online service.”
[Source: Fortune]
