The Blog of Burgher Jon

I recently finished Marc Benioff’s book, Behind the Cloud : The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry.  I’m a SalesForce.com user and a do significant work with cloud computing, so I was interested to hear what the man who claims to be behind my industry had to say.  While I recommend it, I don’t suggest shutting your laptop right now and racing to the local bookstore.  The book didn’t change the way I look at anything and I don’t think it will for you either.  It read more like a textbook for starting small businesses then a story about anything.

The Pro:

Benioff does give you (apparently) every nugget of insight he has about creating a startup, one hundred eleven of them to be exact.   While I would say that none of these transformed the way I think about starting a business, many of them did give me pause.  A few of them even made me change the way I thought about my career goals.  The one I found most interesting was the first – “take some time off”.  He explains that SalesForce.com never would have come to be  if he hadn’t taken a couple months off from Oracle to surf and think life as well as software over.

The Con:

The primary pro outweighs the three cons, but they’re worth mentioning none-the-less:

1. The book is extremely self-aggrandizing.  Some of Benioff’s magical wisdom sounds more like common sense to me.  This doesn’t stop him from telling you how he came up with this common sense and why he deserves a medal for it.
2. The book is a playbook, not a story.  If you’re hoping to learn more about Benioff’s rivalry with former mentor Larry Ellison, it’s not in here.  If you’re looking for information on how the CRM game changed when Ellison’s Oracle purchased Seibel, you’d be better off with a Google search.  Even the parts of the story that are told are difficult to follow because they’re organized around the one hundred eleven plays rather than a chronological flow.
3. The title and message of the book, that SalesForce.com is PRIMARILY about the cloud, is a little dubious.  While SalesForce is, commendably, one of the first successful software as a service (SaaS) implementations, it is somewhat difficult to argue that SaaS and not CRM was the primary point of the company.  I think that SalesForce’s current cloud plays (primarily the Force.com Platform) and the marketing campaign around them drove Benioff to focus on trumpeting his company as a cloud provider, not a CRM provider.  I believe the bottom line of SalesForce.com’s success is that they provided a cheap and flexible alternative to Seibel, at a time when that is exactly what many companies needed.  SaaS was simply the easiest way to offer that.

The Bottom Line:

If you do a lot of reading, put this on the list.  It won’t change the way you think about IT, the cloud, or startups.  It will tell you how one of the most successful companies of the last decade implemented a revolutionary business plan.