Marc Benioff on where big tech is headed | Hacker News Reader

Marc Benioff on where big tech is headed

fortune.com

73 pointscanes200118 comments

"We have an industry that has a history of stinginess and that does not have a good history of giving back."

That doesn't match anything I've heard or read, from what I can tell tech entrepreneurs constantly give back, or at the least consistently invest back. I'm positive this is bias, but is there another industry that creates as many investors? Either angel or future VC partners?

That's not quite the right question, because of course finance would lead in number of investors total, but I mean like created company in industry, this case tech, then invested in more companies in that industry.

how is salesforce.com going to give back to the big data community?

it's a bit like apple. there's no way to pass their "improvements" to BSD on to the BSD community even if they felt magnimonious some day...

generally big tech (aside from IBM, Xerox Parc, and the OLD GUARD that actually did paid research) today are webstack leechers...

maybe the VCs even try to clone techstacks from successful startups but minus that genius builder person who arbitrarily chose reasonably suitable tools because she was familiar and comfortable with them... so instead we get ten million companies looking for "xyz engineers" which is just a big stupid turd sitting in front of us: no, you need a person who may possibly have a comp sci education but has hands on experience building stuff and sees how things work.

Where's our moon landing, where's the next major paradigm shift in user interfaces coming from? where is the salesforce.com ai institute where we can study the big data techniques they pioneered?

the last refuge of real computing == academia? or perhaps the fringe? garages? hey it's never been cheaper to make an asic, they say...

So GCD, WebKit, LLVM, Clang, etc do not count? Ot just don't fit your narrative?

you have a point with LLVM (probably due to the reason you outlined)

However WebKit is steerage, in a direction of their choice.

Apple's stewardship of KHTML paved the way for Chrome/Chromium, which ran off WebKit until version 27. Enabling better browsers is a hugely valuable contribution.

but really, to tie it into the article in question: salesforce.com are the real ones in question. the narrative i'm spinning is that post DARPA, the "computer industry", due to funding strings, doesn't DO computer science per se, but does biased steerage, based upon where individual companies want us to go. in the case of apple, which wall are these bricks in service to? a garden wall, it appears. but you are completely correct in that there is some spillover and I exaggerate to make a point.

The first part of "giving back" is to give people a quality product in the first place that makes people's lives better.

During the financial crisis we saw a lot of shady behavior from the financial sector that might not have been illegal, but was sketchy. Having non-sketchy business practices is the first step and it is seldom talked about. However, I think that the tech sector (and I'm not in it) does a good job of providing real value for people instead of scam my products.

New startup companies can take the 1% pledge and give 1% of their resources to support integrating philanthropy into their business from an early stage.

Marc Benioff knows where everything is headed because he can see what a good portion of America's and the world's sales channels look like for the next 3 - 18 months.

I can't help but think that people who truly feel like they have unique insight into the future would be insane to share it publicly.

Only if the value of you sharing that information at that moment exceeds the value of that information by itself.

Steve Jobs/Andy Rubin were preaching that mobile was the future for longer than I can remember but only after they had something to sell everyone else.

What do you mean? Are there no advantages to openly sharing ideas? Declaring your goals as a means of reaching like minded employees and business partners? What's worth more, secretly choosing the right investment or sharing ideas? Do you think he's only after money? Is there any value in getting credit for your ideas?

What if they have no access to the capital required to make good on that knowledge, but get value out of signaling forecasting abilities?

Or you need to convince people of your forecasting ability in order to get capital.

There's a sweet spot where you're right enough to say "I told you so" and vague enough that no one can use the info.

Well it's altruism at work.

Also, don't forget someone else might have already noticed this same insight, so with some game theory one can easily end up sharing an insight, cancelling out their competition.

Also I think this insight has been pretty easily known for a while now.

Phil Levin, CEO of Evernote, I think had it right when he said "CEOs should think of building a 100-year startup." CEOs have to continually innovate and take a startup mentality to remain relevant.

So he is saying that we need more expert system? I can't help but finding it a bit obvious.

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