Hardball: Playing to win (Salesforce vs Oracle)
I’m a big fan of the book Hardball. If you haven’t read it, I encourage it.
I’ll go further and say we don’t always espouse everything about this philosophy all the time, but we are a small aggressive company and I think there are a lot of interesting insights in the book.
Keeping that in mind, I’m a big fan of Salesforce.com: the way they define themselves, how they build their applications, how they do their marketing, etc. Marc Benioff, their CEO, could have written the book on hardball. Check out the image on their website currently:
You know, I would expect to see something about “Siebel users, please switch.” But something about Siebel employees? I laughed at that for a few minutes. That’s hardball.