<story><title>Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison</title><url>https://steveblank.com/2014/09/25/watching-larry-ellison-become-larry-ellison-the-dna-of-a-winner/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, started out at Oracle. Larry Ellison was his mentor. I think he was even at Larry Ellison&amp;#x27;s (3rd?) wedding. He left Oracle to start Salesforce.&lt;p&gt;Salesforce is a software layer on top of databases, often called CRM. It&amp;#x27;s the answer for &amp;quot;how do you sell a relational database to a guy that just needs a rolodex?&amp;quot; Salesforce actually uses Oracle databases to power their infrastructure, to this day.&lt;p&gt;Over the past 10 years, Salesforce has built out its own platform that basically turns Salesforce into a web-based version of visual fox pro. Which sounds bad, but consider that many &amp;quot;Salesforce.com administrators&amp;quot; are NOT programmers. Then to be taken more seriously as a custom development platform, to be able to add more advanced logic, they built their own scripting language (Apex) and bought Heroku.&lt;p&gt;So it started as (pretty much) a fancy rolodex but has evolved into a platform through which you can develop certain types of software and workflows that would be difficult with alternatives. &amp;quot;Difficult with alternatives&amp;quot; becomes less true every day (which is why I got away from pitching businesses on custom development with Salesforce and into pitching businesses on custom development with python and purely open solutions.) Despite having legitimate competition from open source, their sales and marketing has done a very good job at convincing their users that those don&amp;#x27;t exist, or that Salesforce invented them (&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt; heroku).&lt;p&gt;Maybe you&amp;#x27;ve heard of Oracle or SAP consultants in the 90s making a very good living advising businesses how to set up and use these products? Salesforce.com is now that. And despite being &amp;quot;enterprise&amp;quot; they actually have very talented engineers. Also, critical mass. They have managed to build this ecosystem and everyone working in Corporate IT is drinking the kool aid. Google &amp;quot;Dreamforce 2016&amp;quot; if you want to see just how cult like it&amp;#x27;s all become. Like I say, they are going to replace Oracle. It&amp;#x27;s funny how much shared DNA they have though.</text></item><item><author>tinbad</author><text>Every enterprise I have worked at&amp;#x2F;with had Salesforce, but I&amp;#x27;ve never seen or heard about anyone use it. (What do they even do?) I feel like it&amp;#x27;s one of those companies that&amp;#x27;s good at selling but not really building product(s) people actually use. Not sure same can be said about Oracle, I worked at many corporations where the tech teams were using Oracle DBs for  simple 1-page microsites.</text></item><item><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>For anyone interested in learning more about Larry Ellison and Oracle, I&amp;#x27;d highly suggest &amp;quot;The difference between god and Larry Ellison (god doesn&amp;#x27;t think he&amp;#x27;s Larry Ellison).&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Oracle is a 150 billion dollar company, similar in market cap to Intel. Once you&amp;#x27;ve read histories on these people, it suddenly makes sense that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates hang out, while Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were BFFs. Like with Jobs and Apple, Ellison and Oracle are aggressively polarizing.&lt;p&gt;I see a future of declines for Oracle; Salesforce.com is redefining and taking their market (corporate IT budgets). There is simply &lt;i&gt;no way&lt;/i&gt; other than lock-in and being dicks that they&amp;#x27;ll be able to see the profitability they once had, let alone sales growth (unless by acquisition). You can see it already with their patent suits; they&amp;#x27;re out of ideas. But if you work in the business of software, Oracle&amp;#x27;s history is worth knowing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gaius</author><text>ApEx (Application Express) is an Oracle product, more like a visual RAD tool for the web. Did Salesforce really call their scripting language the same thing??</text></comment>
<story><title>Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison</title><url>https://steveblank.com/2014/09/25/watching-larry-ellison-become-larry-ellison-the-dna-of-a-winner/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, started out at Oracle. Larry Ellison was his mentor. I think he was even at Larry Ellison&amp;#x27;s (3rd?) wedding. He left Oracle to start Salesforce.&lt;p&gt;Salesforce is a software layer on top of databases, often called CRM. It&amp;#x27;s the answer for &amp;quot;how do you sell a relational database to a guy that just needs a rolodex?&amp;quot; Salesforce actually uses Oracle databases to power their infrastructure, to this day.&lt;p&gt;Over the past 10 years, Salesforce has built out its own platform that basically turns Salesforce into a web-based version of visual fox pro. Which sounds bad, but consider that many &amp;quot;Salesforce.com administrators&amp;quot; are NOT programmers. Then to be taken more seriously as a custom development platform, to be able to add more advanced logic, they built their own scripting language (Apex) and bought Heroku.&lt;p&gt;So it started as (pretty much) a fancy rolodex but has evolved into a platform through which you can develop certain types of software and workflows that would be difficult with alternatives. &amp;quot;Difficult with alternatives&amp;quot; becomes less true every day (which is why I got away from pitching businesses on custom development with Salesforce and into pitching businesses on custom development with python and purely open solutions.) Despite having legitimate competition from open source, their sales and marketing has done a very good job at convincing their users that those don&amp;#x27;t exist, or that Salesforce invented them (&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt; heroku).&lt;p&gt;Maybe you&amp;#x27;ve heard of Oracle or SAP consultants in the 90s making a very good living advising businesses how to set up and use these products? Salesforce.com is now that. And despite being &amp;quot;enterprise&amp;quot; they actually have very talented engineers. Also, critical mass. They have managed to build this ecosystem and everyone working in Corporate IT is drinking the kool aid. Google &amp;quot;Dreamforce 2016&amp;quot; if you want to see just how cult like it&amp;#x27;s all become. Like I say, they are going to replace Oracle. It&amp;#x27;s funny how much shared DNA they have though.</text></item><item><author>tinbad</author><text>Every enterprise I have worked at&amp;#x2F;with had Salesforce, but I&amp;#x27;ve never seen or heard about anyone use it. (What do they even do?) I feel like it&amp;#x27;s one of those companies that&amp;#x27;s good at selling but not really building product(s) people actually use. Not sure same can be said about Oracle, I worked at many corporations where the tech teams were using Oracle DBs for  simple 1-page microsites.</text></item><item><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>For anyone interested in learning more about Larry Ellison and Oracle, I&amp;#x27;d highly suggest &amp;quot;The difference between god and Larry Ellison (god doesn&amp;#x27;t think he&amp;#x27;s Larry Ellison).&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Oracle is a 150 billion dollar company, similar in market cap to Intel. Once you&amp;#x27;ve read histories on these people, it suddenly makes sense that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates hang out, while Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were BFFs. Like with Jobs and Apple, Ellison and Oracle are aggressively polarizing.&lt;p&gt;I see a future of declines for Oracle; Salesforce.com is redefining and taking their market (corporate IT budgets). There is simply &lt;i&gt;no way&lt;/i&gt; other than lock-in and being dicks that they&amp;#x27;ll be able to see the profitability they once had, let alone sales growth (unless by acquisition). You can see it already with their patent suits; they&amp;#x27;re out of ideas. But if you work in the business of software, Oracle&amp;#x27;s history is worth knowing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AJ007</author><text>I noticed in the last couple of years as geographically and social circle unrelated friends who were in sales suddenly were working for SalesForce. I imagined they just ramped up their own sales force.&lt;p&gt;From a business standpoint they are big enough to just buy companies. From a longer term tech standpoint it is harder to guess what could happen. The analogy of drug companies doing leveraged buyout of pharmaceuticals with patents nearing a sunset date seems to apply here.</text></comment>