Further to my post on Friday - Salesforce.com revenue or profits? - we listened into the analyst call with Marc Benioff - Salesforce.com's CEO. He delivered this 'rant' about Microsoft.
"Our flagship, Sales Cloud, continued to crush the competition in the quarter. Microsoft's desperate strategy of underfunding, pricing with undifferentiated and highly proprietary products basically has had the same impact on our business as the Windows tablet and Zune did against the iPad and iPod. We call Microsoft's strategy, "the Zune strategy".
It's the concept that they can take a proprietary, undifferentiated offering at a lower price and somehow make an impact on a high-value, highly differentiated product that's loved by customers. Microsoft has not changed our exceptional win rates or affected our average selling price with this Zune strategy.
Customers continue to want visionary products that give them a competitive advantage, not the me-too Zune-type products locking them into these old, proprietary, desktop-driven platforms that are dying off."
We do wish he would say what he really means!