Welcome to Mostly Cloudy! Today: it’s incredible that this picture will be the lasting memory of Bret Taylor’s time at Salesforce.
Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor appear at Dreamforce 2022 wearing rabbit ears, for some ridiculous reason. Credit: Salesforce
There can be only one
Bret Taylor is one of the most accomplished technology and business leaders of our time, the kind of guy Marc Benioff used to be.
Long viewed as Benioff’s heir apparent, especially after the departure of Keith Block in 2020, Taylor announced Wednesday that he would be leaving Salesforce “to return to my entrepreneurial roots.” That news — which prompted me to text Aisha Counts and Joe Williams while walking between meetings at re:Invent with a “holy shit!” like we were still coordinating coverage on Slack — makes it clear that Benioff is still uncomfortable with the idea of succession planning, and that is an existential threat to the future of Salesforce.
As former Google and Oracle exec Peter Magnusson put it on Twitter, where Taylor dared to hold Elon Musk to his word as chairman of a board that delivered incredible value to its shareholders, his track record speaks for itself:
ok so the guy who co-created Google maps, created Google I/O, arguably co-invented PaaS, founded Friendfeed, was pre-IPO CTO at FB for three years, co-founded Quip, was chairman of Twitter and the man that called Elon’s bluff and delivered $10B+ value to shareholders and delivered the Slack acquisition to Salesforce after they lost out (big time) on LinkedIn … is now pushed out? huh? @btaylor is simply (one) of the most capable individuals in the history of Silicon Valley. #CRM’s loss.
Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield, a product-focused tech leader who was eager to work with one of the most product-focused tech leaders in Silicon Valley (the $27 billion didn’t hurt), was taken aback by Taylor’s announcement, according to Kylie Robison at Fortune. And Mark Nelson, president and CEO of 2019’s big Salesforce acquisition, Tableau, announced Thursday that he would also be leaving the company.
This has been a bad year for Salesforce, full of layoffs and activist investors and the end of the pandemic-fueled boom in enterprise software. And now it’s ending on a very uncertain note, a likely turning point for one of the most important cloud enterprise software companies in history.
Salesforce — and Benioff — deserve immense credit for betting big on the notion of browser-based production-grade software that could run anything from a small insurance agency to a Fortune 50 enterprise. That was a revolutionary idea that forever changed the world more than 20 years ago, and no matter what comes next for Salesforce that will always be true.
But it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that under Benioff, Salesforce has not come up with a new idea in roughly the same amount of time. Instead, it has relied on his inexhaustible charm and the cash flow produced by its core invention to acquire its growth, taking ideas invented elsewhere and tweaking them for Salesforce’s current customers, who are more or less locked into the platform by the years of valuable data on their own customers stored there.
By elevating Taylor, Salesforce appeared ready to hand over the reins to one of tech’s most accomplished product development leaders since dot met com. By letting him go, Salesforce will have to fall back on its greatest resource — utter bullshit — to chart a path forward.
Salesforce is a sales and marketing company run by sales and marketing people selling sales and marketing software to sales and marketing people. It is high on its own supply, and extremely vulnerable to upstarts focused on product design and utility.
According to Joe’s sources, Benioff himself was surprised by Taylor’s departure. That might seem hard to believe unless you are familiar with the cognitive dissonance required to operate inside Salesforce, which famously claims to treat its employees as part of an “ohana” — a Hawaiian concept of extended family that goes beyond genetic ties — but paid a PR person a lot of money to argue with me earlier this year that its contractors aren’t really part of that ohana.
If I am ever lucky enough to run an enterprise software media team again, new hires who have never had the experience will be required to watch a Benioff keynote at Dreamforce (only once, though, I’m not a tyrant) to take in the full insane spectacle, which I tried to describe three years ago. A hundred years ago, Benioff would have been a tent revival preacher, selling salvation to desperate people who needed something to follow in a world bereft of true leadership.
That’s the thing about Bret Taylor: Ask anyone who has ever worked with him, and they’ll describe a natural leader, confident but humble. Say what you want about Benioff, but “humble” is not a word that will come up very often in discussions with those same people.
And now he will face one of his greatest challenges: Keeping the company he founded and nurtured as a vanguard of enterprise tech afloat during what could be one of the most trying times for enterprise software spending in recent memory. And he’ll have to do it by bobbing and weaving through reality without some of the capable operators he once thought were worth billions of dollars to secure its future.
At Salesforce, it’s now clear there is only an audience of one.
Around re:Invent 2022
The Thursday keynote address from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is always worth reinventing your way through yet another day of the casinos and incessant party music (this week’s inescapable song was Miley Cyrus’s 2009 hit “Party in the USA,” somehow). The one announcement from Werner’s keynote that seemed to get the most buzz was indeed an interesting gambit: Application Composer, a low-code software development tool for building serverless apps.
AWS likes to play fast and loose with the concept of “serverless,” which at one point meant “functions that operate more or less automatically” and then morphed into “stuff we manage for you.” But tools that make it easier for people to develop software are extremely promising, if unrefined, as Aisha reported earlier this year.
Close observers of this space have noted that low-code tools — which allow the professional code jockeys to have some control over what the unwashed masses produce — probably offer more enterprise-tech promise than no-code tools, which are interesting but unrealistic for applications that need to fit unique business requirements. Developer experience has always been a bit of an Achilles heel for AWS, and Application Composer could be an interesting data point to follow as to whether or not it has made progerss on those goals.
Around the enterprise
Tencent is reportedly expanding its enterprise cloud services business as revenue from gamer bros slows down.
HPE has kicked the tires on acquiring Nutanix, according to Bloomberg.
U.S cloud companies are not cool with proposed E.U. regulations that could exclude them from competing for business in Europe.
Thanks for reading! This week’s Mostly Cloudy is brought to you (not officially) by DripDrop! See you next week!