Tag Archive for 'sarah lacy'

In-depth with Benioff

Published by Ben Kepes on August 8, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, PaaS, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 1 Comment

A hat tip to Daniel for pointing out that Sarah Lacy got to interview Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff - you ca tell that Sarah was please as punch to have got Benioff, she even dragged out her ladylike dress, the pearls and had her hair done for the day!

It’s a pretty good interview, even if Lacy lets Benioff get away with saying some pretty audacious things - things like "everyone has moved to the SaaS model". While I agree that in time most people will move to SaaS, it’s a little presumptuous to say that they already have. Benioff admits that the SFDC PaaS offering is fairly similar to the other PaaS offerings- interesting he didn’t try and talk up their own point of difference to claim superiority.

Interesting to hear of businesses using the Force PaaS service while not actually using SFDC’s original CRM offering - I wonder if there are some internal tensions within Salesforce between the traditional CRM staffers and the platform people.

Benioff sidesteps the obvious questions about his own plans viz a vis his shareholding in SFDC, he also talks openly about the number one enemy - Microsoft. He also pulls few punches when talking about SAP’s abysmal entry into SaaS.

It’s well worth a watch - check it out here.

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Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, what were you thinking?

Published by Ben Kepes on July 26, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, Governance, IT, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 4 Comments

I like Sarah Lacy, I kind of felt for her when she was torn apart for her interview of Facebook founder mark Zuckerberg last year. True she came across that time as something of a sycophant - but she didn’t deserve the evisceration that she got.

But then in my feed reader this morning I read something that Sarah had written. In it she says;

Facebook Continues to Focus on Product, Not Revenues. That’s a Good Thing. While the drumbeat for Facebook’s need to generate bigger revenues grows louder, it was a clear message that Zuckerberg & Co. aren’t done focusing on the product. And as we enter an era of slower ad spending, I think that’s wise. Facebook is break even with a hoard of cash: Right now the product is more important than juicing revenues at users’ expense.

Is she out of her mind - I mean has Web 2.0 got so screwed up that it’s now OK to admit publicly that making money doesn’t rally matter for a business, that it’s the product that matter more than anything. In her defence (slightly) she didn’t say that revenue doesn’t matter at all, just that Facebook has the cash to fund product development for the next little while - so revenue isn’t an immediate imperative.

But let’s be clear here - there is a vast difference between not focusing on making revenue now, and not focusing on how you will make revenue ever - I hope like hell that Facebook is in the former, rather than the latter, camp.

To correct the sense of off-balance that Sarah’s post created, I was pleased to read Phil’s post where he actually mentions the fact that it is a concern that Web 2,0 businesses are so lacking focus about revenue. His points were made in relation to SlideRocket, the online presentation builder that is going to (shock, gasp) charge for the use of its product. Phil says;

It’s good to see that SlideRocket, unlike so many of its Web 2.0 brethren, is equally emphatic about its decision to charge users for its services. At last, there’s a faint glimmer of a monetization strategy coming into sight at the end of the Web 2.0 tunnel.

Nice to see you haven’t completely got caught up in the Web 2.0 hysteria Phil!

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