Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…This isn't like the rebel alliance here. This is like another empire stepping in. A blog post just went up by Aaron Levy talking about how this is a show of force from best in breed applications. Whenever you see best in breed in the enterprise, the codespeak that is, Microsoft is not best of breed. Microsoft is the full integrated system that's best at nothing. I don't know if I totally want to make these my words, but this is the viewpoint of the best of breed argument. They're best at nothing, but they're the best integrated. If you're buying for one single provider, it's the proverbial enterprise one throat to choke. It works best together. You can have one person for your support, you can have one rep, you can have one license, you get bundled pricing, all that stuff. When you see best of breed, what that usually means is people buying from a bunch of different vendors, but it's the best purpose-built software for each of those things. It's very interesting to start to see consolidation among best of breed applications being from one company. One does have to wonder, is this the first of several? Slack might be the most important, because it is the platform, the entry point, the place where you can branch out to many of the other apps from there. If Zoom weren't so expensive, when do we see that? Is there some way that Salesforce has ambition to find other best of breed applications and bring them into the umbrella too? You have to think, regardless of whatever Aaron and Box wants to do themselves, this is fantastic news for them and for their evaluation because at a minimum, file storage is going to be a big part of that puzzle. Either Box or maybe Dropbox is one of the next items on the list for Salesforce. If not, at a minimum, they just got a lot more strategic. I'm sure they already have a partnership with Salesforce as a distribution channel, but that's going to become even more important. If salesforce is now going to be pushing this, hey best of breed, not the easiest to buy for your IT department. This is going to be a tailwind to all other—I'll use this term, I don't mean that pejoratively—subscale software and productivity companies out there. I just mean subscale in that you're not Microsoft or Salesforce. This is just going to be great for their go-to market and distribution.…

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