Larry Ellison in the making? It looks like someone spiked the coffee that Marc Benioff drank with salt, as the Salesforce CEO went off tangent against Microsoft, directly targeting the Surface line.
Some perspective, before we get to the juicy bits.
Back in 2015, Salesforce and Microsoft were seen making amends after the ascension of CEO Satya Nadella, where Benioff expressed a sigh of relief saying that the former boss at Redmond had a hard time working with others.
Fast forward to today, and both companies are, once again, locked fiercely as they battle each other for CRM dominance. Salesforce was in the mood to purchase the social network LinkedIn, before Microsoft swooped in.
And now, during an investor meeting, Benioff, when asked about a possible future reconciliation between the two companies, had a few choice words to say on Microsoft.
Here’s the rant in full:
“No, there’s always one person in the room who’s using a Surface laptop, so I get that. And it’s you. Who else is using a Surface laptop? Raise your hand. OK, we have three people. And how many are using Macs? Raise your hand. How many iPads? OK. How many PCs? And then we’ve got the three Surface.
You know, look. They’re 1 percent of the CRM market. You know the numbers. I like having competitors. But what I just get blown away with is how they just can’t keep, you know, that management team in place. They just keep leaving Microsoft. You know that. And I think they don’t have confidence in that ability to execute in that business. So that has weighed to our favor, and customers feel that.
You know because you go to these conferences just like I do. There is no conference like this that they do and that’s the — in my opinion, the mark. That is — why is it that they don’t have anything like this? That when they put on a conference like something — it’s always the resellers who come together, and then — where are these people? Now, that isn’t to say they don’t have, like, Build, where they get these really high-end developers using the IDE. You know what I mean? Is that the conference I’ve been to where I’m like, Oh, yeah, these are all the — and they’re all Windows — they have a Windows fever. And they have Windows API fever at the conference. But I haven’t seen that in any other part of their business, other than the Windows API. Maybe they’ll get it in Azure — I don’t know.
But I haven’t seen that yet. Because the last time that I went to the conference, I didn’t see that. I only see that fever around the Windows API. And the Surface laptop.”
Brutal.
While there may be merit to what Benioff has stated above, there is no doubt that he has taken the opportunity to express his frustration on the LinkedIn deal.
Salesforce has recently been cozying up to Google for its cloud solutions, and it does not look like there will be any notable collaboration between the two companies in any field — not for the foreseeable future, anyway.
