Salesforce CEO: Social is god and Zuck is its prophet "Business is social" is Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's mantra these days, and throughout his sprawling, star-studded keynote at the company's Dreamforce 2012 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday – which ran nearly a full hour over schedule – he seemingly couldn't repeat it often enough. "This social revolution that's …
but then, there're those sturdy Afghan shepherds who don't give a (...) about FB and rap, enjoying, instead, their century-long pastime of entertaining strangers and cutting their throats, depending on the current wind.
but hey, wait, don't we have an app for that yet?! :(
Jobs kept things under his hat until the last minute and then showily announced them because Apple have an established base of extremely (or insert less flattering noun here) loyal fans who await each new announcement with wallet at the ready.
Announcing new stuff in advance would kill the magic.
Salesforce, on the other hand, have an absurdly inflated share price based on 'thought leadership' and so Benioff needs the analysts to suspend disbelief long enough that he can offload as many shares as possible without panicking the market. A long, deep roadmap of apparently game changing products is key. Delivery of said products doesn't matter until phase 2 (reality sets in. Share price crashes, 'visionary' ceo leaves and board pick up the pieces to see what kind of a business is really there).
When your business is built on bluster you have to keep heaping it on, because when the music stops you have a real Facebook situation (share price crashes, people wake up and wonder what was going on).
"A long, deep roadmap of apparently game changing products is key."
Enterprise wants this, in fact needs this. Apple, whatever one may think of them, is too quick to adopt better technologies for enterprise customers. Heck, how many are still dragging their feet on migrating from XP? And this is not always their choice; budgetwranglers dictate a lot of this, explicitly or implicitly or inadvertently.
Social Networks are a time-killing distraction at best. Any company that insists on trying to get me to sign up to Facebook, or punt a Facebook presence as a brilliant, and unique, marketing innovation will not be getting any of my money, ever.
Any big companies who think that a Facebook page makes them cool, is right up there with those companies who keep stuffing unsolicited marketing crap through my letterbox.
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