Having fought with Salesforce all afternoon to update some assets for customers, I can verify that while the cloud may not be stopped, it may take quite a while it get here. It's incredibly tedious and slow to enter anything but the absolute simplest level of detail. Outrageously expensive, too, given how much of a time sink it is.

I sure hope "the cloud" has a lot more to offer than Salesforce.

From Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/10/05/oracle-boo...)

"The Times notes that Oracle said in a statement that it didn’t cancel the event, but instead decided to move the session from Wednesday to Thursday. “Due to the overwhelming attendance at Oracle OpenWorld we had to make several session changes,” Oracle said.

But Benioff said he couldn’t be there on Thursday morning, and the Times notes that the conference features a Wednesday night concert – Sting and Tom Petty – that would likely run into the wee hours and reduce the attendance at a Thursday morning keynote."

Salesforce is 12 years old company with around 10% CRM market. What was their profit last year? 80 million USD?

You would have to be naive to think Oracle is afraid of Salesforce. I think it's more to do with Benioff's rude knows-it-all attitude.

Salesforce is a publicly traded company with a market cap of $16B, with $2B in annual revenue.

The gap between the reality of their place and power in the market they enjoy, and the commentary here is ... surprising.

If anything, their market cap means they are hugely overvalued.

P/E is 581! This is 5 times more than even facebook :) and 400 times more than Apple.

As soon as I read your comment, I decided to to purchase some AAPL stock. When I got to the stockbroking website, the bargain you mentioned was not there. AAPL's P/E is not 1.4525. :(

what a typo, sorry, of course it is 40 )

Benioff is a good guy. He is the pioneer of the 1/1/1 philanthropy model and has convinced a bunch of other companies to follow suit with that model (i.e. Google et all) and helped out a lot of people.

Also, to be fair he was one of the first people to come up with the idea of the Cloud for the enterprise, and actually deliver a scalable, reliable system which could replace on-premise software.

Oracle is just playing school yard politics; Larry and Marc are friends and Larry was one of the first investors in Salesforce.

Perhaps the comment was aimed in context of Oracle's recent actions with NoSQL - simultaneously downplaying NoSQL and integrating NoSQL with Oracle seemed a bit like a late reaction to the growing trend that's threatening their cash cow.

Exactly another company that is known more for the chatter their CEO makes than the Chatter it sells.

Benioff probably ticked off Ellison's ego when he said Dreamforce was now bigger than Oracle Open World: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/01/...

It'll probably lead to "Who has the best looking beard."

As an impartial bike commuter who has his ride home interrupted by both Dreamforce and Oracle World (both shut down Howard st between 3rd and 4th - I hate them both equally), I can say that the quality of the Oracle World tents and displays are _far_ nicer than Dreamforce's.

So there's that.

Larry has given some humorous talks about the "cloud" but I'm at JavaOne this year and Oracle seems to be fully embracing the cloud. It is impossible to attend a Java EE session without hearing about the cloud.

Salesforce is not "the cloud". It's a company that produces a web app -- a lackluster app, at that.

It's also Heroku

Fact: Sales Force's "cloud" uses Oracle's database and application server software.