Friday, October 7, 2011

Ellison/Benioff smackdown "data exhaust"

Oh boy. The first two members of my Cyber Privateer Fantasy League team are taking public shots at each other. Larry Ellison is calling Marc Benioff's cloud solution the "roach motel" of software, saying you can "check in but you can't check out." Benioff countered in a sally that TechCrunch describes as "beating Ellison at his own game." This is truly great theatre from two of my favorite people in the world. So let me go out on a limb here and make a prediction, based upon "data exhaust" available to me.

Sometime in the next two years, three at the most, Oracle will acquire Salesforce.com. These two masters of PR really are friends and mutual admirers. In one of my long-ago conversations with Larry Ellison, we talked of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. In it, the emperor and his best friend have a stagnate society. To get things jump started again, the emperor (Ellison in this analogy) suggests to his best friend (Benioff) that the friend start a "religion of meaningless lies." The emperor will declare practice of the new religion a crime punishable by death (wink, wink). The friend agrees, starts the religion, and Voila! Suddenly they don't have a stagnate society anymore.

I bring up this analogy, because two masters of the game are having some very public fun. So get some popcorn and enjoy the show.

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Implementation suggestions for THE MORGAN DOCTRINE are most welcome. What are the "Got'chas!"? What questions would some future Cyber Privateering Czar have to answer about this in a Senate confirmation hearing?