Marc Benioff, John McCain, and Talking Straight

Now that Salesforce.com has injected itself into the current presidential campaign, initially by supporting the Mitt Romney campaign's fundraising efforts, I think a comparison between Marc Benioff and John McCain is in order. I used to think of Benioff as a maverick, an entertaining one at that, and his pioneering efforts in software-as-a-service will forever be enshrined as one of the great follow-throughs in the software business. Marc was actually quite good at being a little more straightforward than the average software exec, the exigencies of marketing notwithstanding. The fact that I've known Marc in one capacity or another for almost 20 years helped in my positive assessment, or at least used to.

I also used to think of John McCain as a maverick, and though I don't know him personally, I know someone who flew with him as a pilot in the Navy, back in the day, and who has vouched for McCains personal integrity. McCain's lifestory, and his efforts on campaign finance reform, will forever enshrine him as a true American hero. And I mean it, no sarcasm or irony intended.

Why we're talking about Benioff and McCain in the same breath (or blog) is based on McCain's recent performance at a Baghdad marketplace and Marc's recent performance in the software marketplace -- in the place columnist Herb Caen used to call Baghdad by the Bay, aka San Francisco.

If you want to read how McCain's straight talk reputation went off the rails in one quick visit to Iraq, check out Frank Rich of the New York Times deconstruction of McCain's visit and his claims that all was quiet at the bazaar (sorry, it's a premium page that requires a password.) Suffice to say that in one hot day, McCain's campaign suffered irrepairableharm by his need to pretend that the truth was something other than what it appeared to be. No one was fooled (okay, someone probably was, but even stalwart "pro-surge" Republicans recoiled at his claims.) 

And if you want to read how Benioff's reputation for straight talk keeps running off the rails, read this: at today's press conference, announcing the company's acquisition of Koral and its entry into the unstructured document management market, I asked a simple  question, which boiled down to this: would Marc comment on whether it was necessary for corporate America to move all its unstructured data onto SF.com servers in order to get the admittedly great functionality that the Koral acquisition will bring them. 

The answer Marc gave was a straight as -- gee, just insert your own negative metaphor here, I'm at a loss to capture the convoluted answer in just one word. Suffice to say that one of Marc's loyal customers, sitting next to me, raised an eyebrow or two during Marc's answer, and then whispered "He didn't really answer the question, did he?" 

Nope, he didn't, and it doesn't get much worse than that, in my opinion. Whacking away at your own credibility in front of your customers isn't really what I would call a good idea. You can do it do the analysts (as Marc has done before), but one ought not to mislead the customers, or they'll start wondering what else one might be hiding. 

So let me bail Marc out of a tight spot and answer it for him. Yes, the real goal is to get the petabytes of unstructured corporate data out of the data centers and off the desktop and into SF.com's willing arms. At which point a major revolution will take place, as an unbelievable quantity of data -- all the unstructured content, the stuff that grows on hard drives like weeds in July -- becomes managed by SF.com. This of course would be a very bad day for lots of companies, particularly the ones that provision the corporate data centers and desktops of the world (read: everyone from IBM to Microsoft to Oracle, to, well, everyone). And it would be a major coup for SF.com, the equivalent of taking over the U.S. Mint or something similar. 

It's a pretty audacious vision, one that even a shy flower like Marc can't bring himself to mention. 

For reasons that escape me. Why wouldn't he want to talk about what his new unstructured vision means for the market? And why would he choose to weave and dodge a direct question instead of just coming out and telling it like it is? I think there's more than a few flaws in the vision (coming to a follow-up post any day now), but, as visions go, disruptive, market-shaking, headline grabbing, it's one of Marc's best. 

Unfortunately, like John McCain, Marc Benioff has forgotten that hiding the truth always creates a bigger mess than just coming out and saying what's really up. That's why I liked the old McCain -- the Straight Talk Express -- and that's why l liked the old Benioff. Time was I might have voted for McCain had he come up for election, and, time was I thought Benioff was truly one of a kind.

But the new Benioff, like the new McCain, is showing himself to be motivated by something that is anathema to not only his self, but his goals and interests too. I really wish that the "end of software" would have also included the end of software BS. Unfortunately, neither end is imminent, and the market -- and Marc Benioff -- is all the poorer for it.