In The New Technology Elite, I cited a 2002 anecdote where Steve Jobs is supposed to have told Dan Wood, founder of Karelia Software, then a partner
“You know those handcars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That’s Karelia. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks.”
While the story is humorous, my point in the chapter was to show a decade later Apple had built one of the most vibrant ecosystems in its iOS store ever seen in the industry. And Karelia is still in business.
Vendor partnerships ebb and flow….
What to make of the blockbuster Oracle/Microsoft/Salesforce.com announcement? Clearly there are plenty of cloud implications. Oracle on Azure. More Oracle in the Salesforce infrastructure. More Fusion sales feet on street via Salesforce.
But the reactions seem over the top. “Larry is anointing Marc as successor” “Marc just threw his partners (like Workday) under the bus” “Dell (a Salesforce hardware vendor) is now even more dead” And others about IBM, HP, SAP and Amazon.
My reaction – hats off to Larry Ellison for getting the market into a tizzy. Again. No wonder Business Insider ranks him first in its list of 50 most powerful enterprise tech execs.
The good news here is customers have more cloud validation and cloud choices. And plenty of speculation to chuckle about.
