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That reminds me of a palm pilot app called “BuzzWord” from the first dot com boom. It was a roll of toilet paper for the icon. You’d tap the screen and it would reassemble a dictionary of buzz words in new and interesting ways. I think this guy is still using it.

Or, in otherwords, he’s full of it.

Well done, David. This is the kind of shit that CIO ’s and CEO ’s read and start regurgitating in meetings. “How are we preparing for the post-cloud era?” while everyone else in the meeting thinks, “We’re not asshole, because we don’t know what’s next.”

Great post, David. I liked this Nilay Patel article from this week, “Apple granted patent on webpage scrolling behaviors, media granted patent on crazy” as a good example of what I wish I saw more often.

Laughed hard enough at the buzz-word soup that I started tearing. Good stuff.

So in this “post cloud world”, Salesforce is going to succeed by acquiring “larger quantities of customer data” in their cloud? Embarrassing for Forbes.

Great post! I particularly liked the quote about their “brilliant” use to social media. I have a client who loves that sort of hyperbole, they would rather pay me 3 hours telling them how great something will be for every hour of actual work I do. It pains me, but they pay well!

I’m sure its the same everywhere, when your paid to write by the article/word/whatever.

Check out AOL example: http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-content-slave-speaks-out/

Haha, seems par for the course when it involves Salesforce. Remember Benoiff’s “Ruby is the language of Cloud 2” bit when acquiring Heroku? At least he admitted he made the term up.

It seems he infects journalists (or confirms that a great deal of business “journalism” is press releases rewritten).

I had a similar experience the other day reading an article on International Business Times’ website. The article by Carl Bagh titled ‘Will Apple postpone iPhone 5’s September 7 release to counter Android 4.0 Nexus 4G’s threat ?’ was so full of buzzwords and non-sense that I came to my final conclusion: link bait for google news. I mean, just look at the URL ’s slug! Shame on them. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/165531/20110619/apple-iphone-5-ios-5-android-4-0-nexus-4g-ice-cream-sandwich-1-5-ghz-monster-screen-8mp-camera-edge.htm

The article reads a lot like a press release from two or three sources; certainly not original journalism, just regurgitation.

But what’s being regurgitated? You’re bringing up some good points: what’s “past the cloud”? They’ve already “moved on”?

Is there industry consensus as to what “the cloud” is?

And the social networking aspect smacks of what Facebook was doing two or three years ago by linking users with company profiles. Are they looking to expand that concept by creating yet another social network that links consumers and companies? How? I haven’t heard any of my friends talking about the latest Facebook-killer, which apparently has Facebook as a client…

That Forbes is taking the tack of a start-up tech blog is disappointing, absolutely. But the dribble really isn’t that surprising. Just… odd…

I think he is using http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html to come up with the cool terms.

post cloud = rain

Awesome post.

Good post! Earnings would need to grow 27x to bring the PE from 415 back down to a much more reasonable 15.

They’d need the perfect storm of price control, incredible cost efficiencies and significant cross-sales to make it work. Their license fees are hefty—hundreds of dollars per user per year already. I don’t see top line growth here.

David,

Thanks for pointing this out and it is intriguing on a couple of levels for me.

1. I don’t understand the romance the public has with SalesForce. I use their product and yours and both serve a customers need, but I don’t understand from an investment point of view why people overly invest in their stock. It defies logic based on the profitability of their company, and SalesForces’ ability to spend money.

2. The Forbes article is exactly why media is changing. I actually was a Forbes customer but ditched their magazine for BusinessWeek due to the amount of adds in their magazine, and Forbes never ending gold investment talk. The media in general is becoming less relevant with the advent of blogs and quality media such as Darren Hardy’s Success Magazine setting a new bar. Content is becoming king based on its truth, and information, instead of the company that is pushing it (i.e. Forbes, WSJ , Huffpo, local rags).

Cloud doesn’t mean anything anymore, so can we please stop using it. I was taught that it used to mean a complex infrastructure that got your data from point a to point b. It was so complex we just called it the cloud and assumed our data was going to get where we sent it, like the post office.

The word distributed works better for today’s notion of the cloud. you are distributing your data from your computer to another computer that is at another physical location.

Thanks for articulating a frustration that, clearly, so many of us share. I don’t have an issue with a journalist being enamored with something and writing with a bit of bias peeking through—tough, that piece should be called a commentary or opinion piece, not hard reporting. It’s another thing, entirely, when reports merely repeat the nonsense that someone spouts off in his/her role as huckster-in-chief. There has to be some responsibility to cut through the bullshit and ask, “What does that really mean?” or “How, exactly, do you plan to do that?” Perhaps it’s the easily-bruised egos of the tech CEOs and spokespeople that has lead to reporters being afraid to ask tough questions…fearing the publication will get black listed. So many tech journalists, unfortunately, have become timid sheep that think it’s cooler to incessantly repeat “Post PC” or “Post Cloud” than roll one’s eyes and ask “WTF are you talking about?”

Great article David.

The sense is this: this is written for people that already swallowed information they don’t understand so they can just follow the horde with less anxiety to sell stock (in the shitty market we’re all seeing all around the globe these days.)

It only needs to sound like having foundation but is barely news at all. It’s just to stay under the radar.

Lastly, I don’t know if salesforce.com puts ads on Forbes but this sounds like the Forbes guys doesn’t wan’t to make Benioff feel uncomfortable with properly done journalism just in case he wants (to publish ads with them.)

Fortunately, blogs, and companies that think clearly and make sense of things, can describe without BS and expose theirs.

Maybe isn’t elegant journalism but journalism isn’t about elegance, is about telling the stories with a view that makes sense.

I use their product and yours and both serve a customers need, but I don’t understand from an investment point of view why people overly invest in their stock. It defies logic based on the profitability of their company, and SalesForces’ ability to spend money.

I agree it is not a well-written article. But the content makes a bit more sense (at least the bit about social media), when you consider their recent acquisitions (e.g. Radian6). They are looking to integrate monitoring of social-media into their core CRM product, and the financial analysts apparently believe they will be successful in doing so and make a lot of money from it.

Part of the problem here is that blogging is being mistaken for, or accepted as, journalism.

To sound like an old fart, there was a time when being a journalist required mastery of the English language (or your language of choice). Now that blogs have infiltrated media as a respected news source, the standards by which old forms of reporting were held no longer exist.

This type of stream-of-consciousness drivel is typical of an untrained writer. And it’s not just about education, either. I have friends who graduated with journalism degrees that can’t form a decent sentence.

In the same way that texting is shifting the way we communicate, hearsay and blogs are changing the way we receive our news. For better or worse, we’ve all got to do our own filtering from now on.

Nick Davies has written an excellent insider expose of this kind of Journalism “Flat Earth News”. I’m not sure if it is Nick who coined the phrase “Churnalism”, but it captures the essence of this kind of article.

Shortly after reading this book I read “Risk” by Dan Gardner. The two books together pretty much sum up the depressing state of the journalism profession.

You know what comes after the cloud? Fucking rainbows.

(sorry, had to be said)

Heh, I call this “politician talk”, because most politicians I’ve ever heard speak like that. If you listen closely and try to understand what exactly they mean or what they’re proposing, you begin to understand that you don’t understand anything they say, yet it sounds kind of “pretty” :-)

The mistake in this rant is in presuming that writers for Forbes are “journalists.” They’re not. The publication focuses on the business world, and is controlled by it. Writers are more flak than hack. It is naive to expect honest, hard-hitting reporting from their ilk. Who cares what they say anymore? With all the good forums, threads & information resources out there now no need for trade journalists, beyond insider gossip, exists. Further, writers work on deadlines & have seen their salaries go down as their industry tanks. It’s easy to just lift a few lines from a news release, without critical evaluation, and run with those for a quick article.

Sounds like a sales man. Full of bull shit that makes no sense but enough to get a sale whilst the audience is suitably confused.

@joe: post cloud = double rainbow!

We all know beyond the cloud is space :)

But don’t you love his sense of humor? ”...pre-cloud technologies” like Microsoft’s client/server systems and IBM ’s Lotus notes, conceived before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was,...”

According to SF t&c’s the customer owns the data, so not exactly sure what they’re going to mine.

The article was doomed from the start.

The writer was listening to Benioff… and Benioff had fear in him… fear that his interview needed to sound “smart…” so first came his complicated, authoritative, and thoroughly confusing words.

Next the writer started to write, and he too had fear in him… fear that his article needed to sound “smart…” so next came his complicated, authoritative, and thoroughly confusing INTERPRETATION of Benioff’s complicated, authoritative, and thoroughly confusing words.

Garbage, garbage in, garbage, garbage out.

Forbes.com is pretty open on the fact that they don’t have journalists. Almost a year ago, Forbes announced that it would open the door to 1000s of unpaid contributors rather than paying for quality reporting. Since then tons of amateur bloggers got invitations to contribute new content or copy existing content onto Forbes blogs for exposure in lieu of pay, including myself (I declined). It’s all about the eyeballs.

Post cloud = software now shipped on 1.44MB Diskettes. Optical drives now obsolete.

I guess that $200M purchase of Heroku was a mistake then…

Hi David

I completely agree with your sentiments.

But I’d also just like to point out how much I adore your candid blogging. It’s refreshing to read the views of a real human with a real opinion, instead of all the neutered press-release gunk being spat out by other software companies.

Keep it up! You’re an inspiration to many.

Cheers from South Africa, Kosta

PS: great job on Rework

So. Pre-Cloud = Sun, then?

Benioff was doing this on a frequent basis a few years back (he is entitled to do what he likes). When I was at Salesforce the P/E was around 3600 or something insanely high. They have exasperated all things “Cloud” but it is a hot word in the press these days.

He is Cashing out a killing through slick marketing. http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1108524/000112760211000142/xslF345X03/form4.xml

If the author didn’t grok “This concept uses social media to gain knowledge of internal activities and externally about customers to ultimately help increase customer loyalty and foster interaction between employees and between the company and its customers.” – then the author should try some remedial reading comprehension.

This stuff completely drives me nuts. Literally I can’t stand the buzzwords. When I hear it I want to run screaming. It’s my biggest pet peeve… because it’s completely meaningless.

Did it also start with, “In today’s fast paced world …”?

Articles like this always bring me back to Paul Graham’s article on the subject:

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

The guy did a copy paste of the PR hit that ran through him. Lazy modern “journalism”. Nothing more, nothing less.

Absofuckinglutely.

“Beware of false clouds!” Haha. Nice post DHH .

It’s like it was written by Sarah Palin’s speech writer. A bunch of words that, when strung together, don’t equal much more than lorem ipsum text.

likey

Presumably they’re not looking at customer data for a step 1: mining, step 2: ???, step 3: profit scheme?

Take a look at Salesforce’s Jigsaw.com acquisition. http://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2010/04/100421.jsp

Sounds like data mining to me.

Programmers once built a software tool to randomly produce short poems. They coded basic grammar rules, but other than that it was all random buzzwords.

Professional literary critics thought it was the best poetic literature they had ever seen. They actually discussed the deeper meaning of each poem.

Meaning – the world is full of white noise. And if journalists can’t even see that, then humanity is hopeless.

Part of the problem is that we live in a post-truth world…

post cloud = rain

Joe said that not me (I clicked ‘post’ too soon).

Amusing!

Marc Benioff is today’s PT Barnum. He has fooled Wall Street, the Business Analysts, and just about everyone else who listens.

Institutional Investors are so deep, they can’t dump it without taking a bath, so it will continue to peak at ridiculous multiples until enough people look at fundamentals and realize he is not running a profitable business.

When a CEO touts the top line, and does not worry about the bottom line, he is usually rewarded with an E – for Extra Special, and a X – for Xtraordinary and hence his title will become EX-CEO!