Brief review of Behind the Cloud book by Marc Benioff X

Brief review of <> book by Marc Benioff

Just finished reading the book by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff entitled Behind the Cloud. It is an interesting reading. It is both about how to start a company (a SAAS company to be specific) and how to create an industry (the cloud computing industry).

There are many unconventional strategies such as hiring actors to protest on competitors user conferences or events.

To be frank and honest, I don't learn anything new about cloud computing in this book. I admire authors conviction and creative vision when cloud computing was still "behind the cloud" a decade ago.

Being an SVP of Oracle after only 13 years in Oracle is a big accomplishment and most corporate employees will never get to this position, let along to be friend with Larry Ellison. So, it took the courage and strong believe for Marc to start Salesforce.com right before the dot.com bust. It is interesting to know that Larry Ellison even lend $2 million to support Marc and let Marc took 3 Oracle employee to start the company and also offered him to come back to Oracle if the business went bust.

The book gave a detailed account and rational on why monthly subscription model does not work (due to shortage of cash flow) and yearly subscription is the way to go and also worked with SEC to reconcile the accounting rules for revenue recognition.

After reading his book, I have watched one of his recent presentation on the "Cloud 2.0". Essentially, "Cloud 2.0" is Cloud 1.0 meets with social web or web 2.0. Salesforce.com now hosts an social application called chatter, it is a kind of "facebook" inside the salesforce.com. My take was that majority of application in the salesforce.com are not really revolutionary new. The only change is the delivery and pricing model, and the so called democratization of IT and rapid elasticity (as defined by NIST). The slogan "No Software" does create confusion and stir, but catch people's attention. So, it is a smart logo and slogan for Salesforce.com. I guess that if Marc would choose his start up company now, he may not called "salesforce.com" anymore since his goal is far beyond sales automation software market. He may call it "NoSoftware.com" or "CloudWare.com" or something "CloudAppStore.com" to match with Apple or "CloudAppWorld" to match with BlackBerry.

I also agree with Marc's comments on Oracle. Oracle's slogan after acquisition of Sun Microsystems was "Oracle is the world's most complete, open, and integrated business software and hardware systems company". So, the under pining mission for Oracle is to sell you software and hardware. So, it is why Oracle's cloud computing strategy is behind its major competitors such as Microsoft, IBM, Google and Salesforce.com. Marc mentioned that Salesforce.com is "Complete" without selling you any software and hardware. This is essence of cloud computing.