CEO: 'Salesforce.com 2.0' to take on Microsoft
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Everyone knows Salesforce.com as the company that pioneered SaaS (software as a service) and survived the dot-com bust when many other ASPs didn't. Now, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff says the company is ready to take on MicrosoftÂ as a leading development platform provider, a strategy he unveiled as "Salesforce.com 2.0" in New York on Tuesday.
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TechWeb - Lagging Salesforce and others in the hosted CRM market, Microsoft will try to win customers with lower pricing.
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Following launch of corporate telephony software, Microsoft's chairman discusses how speech recognition has made inroads and where it has yet to go.Video: Gates' crystal ball
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CEO accentuates the positives about new Microsoft operating system at today's launch event.
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Microsoft's chairman chats with CNET News.com just before CES about his company's consumer push--and why he hasn't done a blog yet.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled a beta version of the company's new mashup tool, and criticized SaaS efforts by Google and others in a keynote at the Web 2.0 Summit today.
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The race for the best mash-up builder picks up as Microsoft opens up Popfly at the Web 2.0 Summit.
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Microsoft's CEO tells financial analysts that the company has a plan to take on its major rival. Yahoo could speed up the plan, but it will build its ad business, regardless.
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Microsoft buys in, kinda WPC Steve Ballmer has promised Microsoft will take the lead in online software and services through a middle-of-the-road approach, while talking swipes at technology luddites and evangelical extremists.â¦
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Blog: CEO 2.0: If you're going to tout the benefits of Web 2.0, might as go all the way, figures Socialtext CEO.
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Microsoft&#39;s financial chief said this week that the software giant is more likely to make big acquisitions than it has been in the past.
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Details are scarce at this point, but the next client OS will have a "fundamental piece of enabling technology," a Microsoft executive said this week, such as a hypervisor or new type of interface.
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Class libraries in, execs out Salesforce.com will next month release its Apex programming language to developers hungry to mash-up web-based business applications with its "platform in the sky" and to reassure investors anxious about growth.â¦
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The success of Facebook's Web-app building tools hasn't gone unnoticed by Salesforce.com, which on Friday announced a new platform for building on-demand business software that it hopes will lead to an "explosion" of applications.
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Thursday detailed his company's progress on Web 2.0, saying the company had launched Popfly and the extension of several other Live Services.
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Microsoft has announced the resignation of its head of acquisitions, Bruce Jaffe, two days after the company&#160;bid $1.2 billion for enterprise search expert Fast Search &amp; Transfer. Jaffe will retire on Feb. 29, the company said.Jaffe joined the company&#39;s corporate strategy group in 1995, moving on to become chief financial officer of its online services business MSN before taking the role of corporate vice president for corporate development, where he was responsible for the company&#39;s acquisitions and joint ventures strategies.&quot;Bruce&#39;s contribution to Microsoft&#39;s growth is much appreciated and we wish him well in his next endeavor,&quot; the company said in a statement.It&#39;s not clear yet what that next endeavor will be, although some reports say he is looking for a more entrepreneurial role in a smaller company.Jaffe, who has a Masters in Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, lives near Seattle.As architect of Microsoft&#39;s acquisitions strategy, Jaffe presided over its&#160;$6 billion offer for online advertising company aQuantive, a few weeks after Google bid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick.Microsoft representatives would not say what role Jaffe played in the company&#39;s bid for Norwegian company Fast Search &amp; Transfer, revealed Tuesday.