Marc Benioff
FameRank: 4

"Marc Russell Benioff" is the founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, a cloud computing company. As of February 2015, he owns approximately $3 billion worth of Salesforce shares, although the company has never reported a profit.

Benioff started salesforce.com in March 1999 in a rented San Francisco apartment and defined its mission as The End of Software®. He is “credited with turning the software industry on its head” by using the Internet to “revamp the way software programs are designed and distributed.” He has long evangelized software as a service as the model that would replace traditional enterprise software. He is the creator of the term “platform as a service” and has extended salesforce.com’s reach by allowing customers to build their own applications on the company’s architecture, or in the salesforce.com “cloud.” He is the author of three books, including the national best seller Behind the Cloud.[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=marc+benioff&x=0&y=0 Amazon.com: marc benioff] He currently serves on the board of Cisco.

More Marc Benioff on Wikipedia.

We have competed against [Microsoft] in the CRM market since 2002 and they have failed to deliver a competitive product. They just cancelled version two of that legacy application and skipped ahead to three. In the meantime, we are on the 18th generation of our service. Customers are tired of waiting for Microsoft to innovate.

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We believe in the art of war. We are trying to get our competition to attack us with angry, virulent energy, so we can transform that into larger market share.

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We would be delighted to hear from any Siebel employee that would like to join our company that meets our rigorous standard for excellence and dedication to customer success.

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Microsoft's whole strategy.

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Following the proposed acquisition of Siebel by Oracle many existing Siebel employees may be concerned about their career prospects, ... We want to offer them an alternative to an environment of declining commissions, confused customers and uncertainty around career viability.

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What if there was an eBay of applications, where companies could buy and sell software, running on our platform? ... What if there was an iTunes Music Store of online applications?

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They have created a culture of acquisition instead of innovation. It's a lot easier just to write big checks than it is to innovate.

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Please note that most - but not all - Siebel employees are currently eligible for hire at salesforce.com today and that the recruiting department will screen for eligibility.

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