After twenty years, what Marc Benioff got right and wrong about the cloud | Hacker News Reader

After twenty years, what Marc Benioff got right and wrong about the cloud

techcrunch.com

94 pointschuy0820 comments

> Adobe Suite successfully made the switch from the upfront model to thriving subscription businesses

I hope this new trend of crippling software, after a set time period, comes to an end. I can understand web apps like Microsoft Office 365 becoming inaccessible, but apps that are installed on my PC and that I paid for ? That is a bad trend

I think that a lot of this is actually being driven by new accounting standards (ASC 606 - Revenue Recognition), basically the new rules state that for subscription revenue to be recognized over time, the software must be materially disabled at the end of the period. This matters mainly b/c it has tax implications. If companies don't disable the software the entire value of the customer's contract must be recognized up front (as well as taxed upfront), this is true even if the payments are still made monthly. Paying taxes now on revenue that comes in later isn't good for cashflows and as such it creates a business problem that trickles down to consumers.

While that may be a factor, I think it was inevitable to go to a subscription business rather than one time sale. Consistent cash flow, vendor lock in, no risk of piracy, ability to raise prices quickly (or slowly), not having to support everyone's Windows installations or whatever OS they may have full of malware.

Who wouldn't want to have a rent seeking business, given the option?

I don't think it's just new accounting rules since this was the preferred model in the past, too, for the obvious reasons. It broke when the PC revolution hit and direct sales to consumers became the dominant business for most vendors but the customers couldn't be assumed to have any network connectivity or even someone who'd install upgrades if you paid the non-trivial cost to ship them.

Now most vendors can assume reasonable network connectivity that's not a constraint and the recurring monthly revenue is quite appealing.

Any company that cares about ASC 606 isn't reporting taxes on a cash basis anyway. They report on an accrual basis which has little to do with when customers pay.

>I hope this new trend of crippling software, after a set time period, comes to an end.

I don't really disagree with you but the idea that a piece of software you buy will run forever is an idealization. In theory, you can supposedly run some unupdated, unpatched app on a similarly unupdated OS in a VM forever. In practice though, you'll increasingly have problems running a software version that's long out of support.

The time scales are different of course; the app will likely run for a few years at least. But, as some point, you'll probably need to upgrade.

My wife has an embroidery machine. The very expensive embroidery software runs on Windows XP. I have a VM dedicated for this software with no intention to update. Obsolescence for software shall not be acceptable. Bits do not rot.

When you elevate everyone else’s risk exposure by driving too fast on a public road or smoking in a public place, you pay a fine. I imagine we’ll need to do the same to people who feel that “bits do not rot” operating ancient software on the internet. (With similar allowances for doing whatever you want in private).

That's the important distinction. If you have, in effect, an embedded application/OS that isn't networked or for that matter a 1980s gaming machine, you can run CP/M for all I care as long as it's isolated from the external network (and ideally not networked at all). But if you're connecting to the Internet with an unsupported version of Windows, you're being irresponsible.

Because your computer is going to infect someone else's computer with a virus? If that's the argument, then this thread is starting to look like a vax/anti-vax debate.

I can only assume that you've never worked in a manufacturing environment.

Then it's only for the better: Windows 10 now will force the developers to move on to other systems that do not require regular updates to keep going.

The expectations for industrial systems and, for that matter, a lot of mainframe software are quite different--and the costs tend to be baked into the price of the software and the rest of the environment they operate in. And, a lot of the time, that software is under (expensive) support contracts.

A move that gave me the determination to move to open source. It requires some adaptation work, but the softwares are often much more customizable. But I know that some features of photoshop are not found in any open source app, so if you use those, you will have a harder time to move out.

Benioff is undoubtedly a great CEO, but I wonder which other early employees deserve credit for the paradigm shift in B2B to SaaS.

Surely cofounder and CTO Parker Harris had a lot to do with multitenancy and countless other technical innovations, yet he gets very little play in the media. Maybe he likes it that way.

Yeah. Like Craig Silverstein at Google ( now at khan academy,last I heard). Even for Tesla, Straubel deserves much more recognition, but I think he himself doesn't appear much in public. IMO, Larry and Sergey are also seldom in public for the past few years.

Not mentioned in the article, but Salesforce was a pioneer for Developer engagement:

    * Free developer sandbox instance of Salesforce
    * IDE plug-ins (Eclipse, ...)
    * API first. SOAP and REST APIs for everything
    * Object oriented database manipulation language
    * Visual DB schema designer
    * "App store" distribution model

These features are considered table stakes for any new SaaS/PaaS vendor.

It's been a decade since I've tried writing any queries against their "database" but at the time you couldn't do any sort of JOIN. Has that changed?

In SOQL you can do it with a nested SELECT, but it's not as intuitive as your standard outer join in SQL:

https://developer.salesforce.com/page/A_Deeper_look_at_SOQL_...

No literal JOIN support, but comparable workarounds. The price for a serverless, multi-tenant DB is governor limits.

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