Benioff: Berserker Against Microsoft

Mark Benioff's gunsites are squarely on Microsoft and he's starting to draw a bead on the Redmond software giant. Benioff has a new laser guided missile in his arsenal; Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs. If the battles lines weren't clear enough already, this week's partnership announcement between Salesforce.com and Google makes the battle lines in the war for cloud computing and SaaS bragging rights crystal clear. Google's now more than just an integration point, they're becoming an allie in Benioff's federation of software, platforms and partners.

You can't dispute Saleforce's dominance in the CRM marketplace but you can't call them the undisputed winner of SaaS or PaaS quite yet. There's still Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle and others that haven't conceded to Benioff's unconditional CRM surrender demands. And Force.com is far from the winner in a very early game of PaaS offerings. Benioff has to roll out something other than the same Bose application he showed at Force.com's launch.

I'm not defending Microsoft here, far from it. Benioff's mostly saber rattling but it's not all smoke and mirrors. SaaS has got legs and I believe PaaS in one or (more likely) multiple forms will too. The question is whether Salesforce plus Force.com are the right jumping off point to make inroads into IT's software apps. Maybe.

From my standpoint, I want to see Salesforce continue to make big strides with sales management SaaS, PaaS and cloud applications. Competition between vendors is all good. It's both a forcing function to advance software's move into the cloud and the services for ISVs and apps who want to be there. And Benioff's relentless public assault on Microsoft makes it clear that there's more than one vision of the future. Benoff is the Norse berserker equivalent in battle who's rage against the enemy is an intimidating force all it's own. It's another missle in Benioff's "take no prisoners" war to become the leader in the next era of software.