6 ms·
Thinking about this just in terms of product... There are two real competitors on the market - MS Office, and Google Docs. Office is where it is today through
by beat 10y ago
Thinking about this just in terms of product...
There are two real competitors on the market - MS Office, and Google Docs. Office is where it is today through sheer inertia. It's a slow-moving and often terrible product. Google Docs feels like a "free product", with a lot of limitations. The market feels like someone could "Slack" it - walk in with a good enough product and just lay waste to the incumbents very quickly.
The shift to cloud-based tools is happening rapidly, pushed by the ubiquity and quality of mobile devices. Salesforce practically invented this market, and they have incredibly deep hooks into the enterprise (and lucrative enterprise licensing agreements). MS Office feels like a clunky antique hobbling users to their clunky old PCs, but Google Docs isn't going to satisfy the corporate power users who are amazingly productive with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.
Mark Benioff is ambitious. This isn't about his RoI for some A round investment. He's already a billionaire. More money is just bouncing the rubble. What's important is he built a company, Salesforce, at the top of the second tier of the software industry. It's important enough to have shaped the industry, and make billions - but it's not Google. It's not Apple. It's not Oracle. And it's not Microsoft. If he wants to break into that tier, he needs to level the company up. Taking over the enterprise productivity app market and consigning Microsoft to the dust bin of history? That might just do it.
And finally... like all large companies, Salesforce may be facing market saturation and a tapering off of growth. It's too big to easily develop breakthrough products in house anymore. Instead, there's growth through acquisition, buying hot startups with the ample buckets of cash you have, to break into new markets.
So maybe, just maybe, this buyout is exactly what it looks like.
- justincormack 10y agoGoogle seemed to decide to stop investing (they bought docs didn't they? But improved for a while). Sun in an earlier era did the same with open office but gave up, mostly. Seeing sustained investment would be good, but there is huge legacy in office software. The real disruption we see is markdown and git, but there might be an intermediate in usability. (Microsoft are doing pretty well at not leaking revenue)
- duaneb 10y agoThe killer is sharing via a web browser. No word needed ever.
- douche 10y agoOffice through Office365 has, IMO, left Google Docs behind. It's actually quite a nice product - arguably better than the more recent versions of the desktop clients, for non-power usage. GoogleDocs hasn't changed appreciably in the ten plus years I've been using it. I get the impression that Office 365 is eroding their solid foothold in education, and I've been seeing enterprises go to Office 365 en masse, mostly for Exchange, but the whole Office suite comes along with it.
- hk__2 10y ago> GoogleDocs hasn't changed appreciably in the ten plus years I've been using it Google Docs went publicly available in 2007 (= 9 years ago); how can you have been a user for 10+ years?
- douche 10y agoI guess it's only been just under 10 years[1], rather than 10 plus. [1] http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-announces-google-docs_11.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-announces-goo...
- kwijibob 10y agoJust scan through the google docs blog. You'll see lots of steady iteration of new features. It gets better and better. I use it daily and also find the speed and reliability excellent. It feels like they are making great strides behind the scenes in scalability. I have written 4000 words fully references postgrad essays in google docs. Google spreadsheets does all my organisations budgeting and planning systems.
- beachstartup 10y ago> Google spreadsheets does all my organisations budgeting and planning systems. i suspect this is the #1 use case.... roll-your-own centralized shared ERP with version tracking, permissions, users, etc. it's what we use too, but as we grow we're slowly replacing individual spreadsheets with real/saas tools, but then we're just making new ones for software that doesn't exist yet, so it continues to grow overall.
- curiousDog 10y agoYou seem to be unaware of the fact that Office isn't desktop only any longer. Office 365 is growing like crazy and there's no way Salesforce is going to catch up before the cloud wave blows over. Infact, modernizing and getting office on ever device has been the shtick of Satya since he took over.
- beat 10y agoI'm fully aware of that. I've used Office 365. It's still tied painfully to its legacy, and Microsoft is in a vulnerable spot, trying to transition the product to the future. Think like an ambitious CEO for a moment. The dynamic nature of the situation on the ground means that Office - the most successful enterprise monopoly since IBM invented the punchcard - has never been more vulnerable. You can buy a competitor in the space who isn't carrying around a bunch of legacy, whose founder's track record of successful cloud products includes, oh, Facebook. You've already got a monopoly on an enterprise cloud product where Microsoft can't really compete. Same end user base. Do you grab for that brass ring? Or make excuses why it's impossible?
- askafriend 10y agoViewed through this lens, it looks like a fantastic bet at quite a cheap price. I mean look at the Instagram bet. That was looked at as expensive back then, but now it's considered very very cheap. It's all up to SalesForce how they handle the acquisition, but the potential is there, as you describe.
- bla2 10y agoYou probably haven't used Google Docs in a while. It's much more capable than four years ago in my experience, and does everything I want it to do these days.
- beat 10y agoI use Google Docs virtually every day, and I'm no power user. But I know real Office power users in corporate settings. They'd point and laugh. Meanwhile, I'm beating my head against a wall trying to get Google Docs to handle nested lists and tables adequately. It's a crap product, a toy, at least by enterprise standards.
- jessaustin 10y agoBut I know real Office power users in corporate settings. They'd point and laugh. Does this emperor ever wear clothes? I've heard about these people, only to discover they were "masters" of some truly suboptimal tasks like "track changes" or "paragraph styles".
- beat 10y agoOne word... Excel.
- jessaustin 10y agoI'm sure there are some wonderful things Excel does that Sheets doesn't, but since I haven't noticed them they don't bother me. One thing that I don't miss about Excel is the 2^16 row limit. Also I seem to recall some difficulties copying and pasting pivot tables, but it's been a few years...
- dragonwriter 10y ago> I'm sure there are some wonderful things Excel does that Sheets doesn't PowerPivot.
- 10y ago
- bla2 10y agoYou probably haven't used Google Docs in a while. It's much more capable than four years ago in my experience, and does everything I want it to do these days.
- tlogan 10y agoExactly - if Salesforce wants to survive they need to offer a full suite of office productivity apps. Quip seems be a good fit to fill up that hole. Honestly, I was thinking they will buy Evernote but I guess Evernote has crappier product and Salesforce does not need users: just something quality they can improve on it. So the question now is: Who is going to buy Evernote?
- dilemma 10y agoI have to use Quip every day and I'm dying for Office 365. Quip is actually terrible.
- adotjdotr 10y ago"Office is a terrible product" Sure, everyone office in the world uses it as software of choice. I wish all software products were that terrible.
- beat 10y agoThere's this silly myth that capitalism produces the best products at the lowest prices. A hard look at successful products is the best argument against that. Get a monopoly, create market barriers to entry that aren't "product quality", and enjoy.