Steve Gillmor and Nik Cubrilovic, the hosts of the new TechCrunchIT site, snagged an interview with salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff after the announcement of Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs. Benioff gives a lengthy commercial for his platforms-as-a-service strategy to remake the software industry and create a multi-billion dollar software company.
When asked about the challenges for older enterprises, Benioff said, "I don't have time or patience for the status quo...for people who are trying to control innovation or stop the future." He included Microsoft, as well as unnamed vendors, partners, journalists and other parties on his list of those who are holding onto the past and getting in the way of innovation.
"Thank god for Google," he added, citing his ally in the battle against Microsoft and the cloud-forsaken Luddites. It's shaping up to be an interesting battle. Salesforce.com could also find itself as an acquisition target.
I covered the announcement today in my post "Marc Benioff's mantra: Anything but Microsoft".
The blogosphere is atwitter (see Techmeme) with Mike Arrington's latest call for someone to "pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET-crushing $200 million per year in revenue business."
It's pleasing to have Mike and others targeting CNET. It must mean that we are at the top of the heap. Competitive envy comes with the territory. And I admire what Mike, Om Malik, Matt Marshall, Rafat Ali, and others have done to build their networks and companies. In fact, we are all friends.
But I'm all for competing. We have lots of ammunition stored up. And our troops across CNET News.com, Webware, Crave, Reviews, and Download.com are in the field as I speak, getting after the important stories.
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