Daniel Lyons
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Nov 19, 2009 10:02 AM
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Marc Benioff is the
founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, a $1 billion (revenues) software
company that sells software that helps salespeople manage their
accounts. He's also an incredible egomaniac and self-promoter, perhaps
the most outrageous one in all of Silicon Valley—and that's saying
something. Benioff recently penned an autohagiography called Behind the Cloud,
in which he talks about making a spiritual quest to India and swimming
with dolphins in Hawaii and then coming back and starting
Salesforce.com with the Zen-like and noble goal of changing the world
into a better, more enlightened place where salespeople could become
even more effective at squeezing money out of prospects. Ahem.
Benioff's claim to fame is that he pioneered the idea of "software
as a service," meaning you don't need to buy a copy of his software and
install it on your computer. Instead, the software sits on servers at
Salesforce.com and you just pay to use it. Back in 1999, when Benioff,
a former Oracle executive, launched Salesforce.com, software as a
service (aka SaaS) was a pretty big change. Today it's common, only now
it's called "cloud computing," which is why Benioff's book is called Behind the Cloud.
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