Life and Tech #22: Learning from the Master at Salesforce

This is my email newsletter that I sent out last night as Rackspace's Futurist. Please subscribe at  https://eepurl.com/bjalx5 

Marc Benioff is the master.
 
170,000 people showed up this week to watch Salesforce CEO and Co-founder Marc Benioff perform in front of the ever larger audiences at its Dreamforce event.

Since I was able to sit in the front row and study Steve Jobs when he was still around, I wondered what I’d learn by sitting a few feet from Benioff. Disclaimer, Rackspace is a Salesforce customer, and Benioff wrote the forward for my book, “Age of Context.”
 
Here’s some things:

He leaves nothing to chance. They released the real news last week, long before the press would even show up at the event.

Why? Well, that way attendees would already know what sessions they needed to attend to learn about the latest. Also, journalists often get caught in traffic, get tired or just don’t have the ability to understand what speakers said on stage.

By meeting with them a week earlier, Salesforce can control the message a lot better than by trying to rendezvous with the hundreds of journalists that show up at Dreamforce.

It also means journalists have an outline of articles, like this one in Venture Beat, that they fill in with photos and quotes from the event itself: https://venturebeat.com/2015/09/16/everything-announced-at-dreamforce-2015/

Brand tying is religion. If you walk around San Francisco this week, you’ll see sign after sign for the brands that Salesforce is trying to align itself with, from Uber to Aetna.

On stage, Benioff is a master of walking around the huge pavilion and either saying hi to representatives from different brands, to having them on stage. Many times brands like Cisco, get many minutes all to themselves on the Dreamforce stage.

Dreamforce is where he pushes his teams. I’ve been to a half dozen of them now.
 
Benioff regularly announces new technology (yesterday he announced IoT support). But when you push the teams for real software, or even pricing, they answer, “we’ll have those details soon.”

Sure enough, over the next year, those details trickle out of Salesforce at various events. I even used this to write a book. I knew that to get my book featured at Dreamforce, we needed to ship it before Salesforce announced a feature on it.

Here’s a hint: I bet that next year Salesforce will be all over Virtual and Augmented Reality. It was too early this year, but next year look for sexy demos with Microsoft Hololens, which is rumored to ship next summer, at least in beta form.

Benioff's team does a masterful job at trying to make the show entertaining and not just dry. Stevie Wonder opened up the keynote yesterday. One of the co-founders, Parker Harris, showed up on stage in a funny “Lightening Man” suit.

They’ve pushed themselves to get closer to customers, with a round stage that Benioff visits infrequently as he walks through the audience. When I walked up to get a better photo, I found each section is watched by executives and others, and they make sure nobody blocks camera angles, or gets out of line.

It makes sense, since the theme for the last few years has been that Salesforce helps you build a customer-centric company.

Benioff is an amazing listener, even as he obviously has to keep track of many things while he walks around and presents. During his interviews with other execs, it’s clear that he’s not scripted, and he adds value on the fly.

Very few execs can pull off this “scripted non scriptedness.” Watching him you can tell he’s rehearsed most of it though, the same way a jazz musician knows just how many bars he/she can improvise before getting back on script.

After the talk I walked through the expo hall looking for other hints of where the industry is going. If you walk through the expo hall, like I did athttps://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10153596186599655 , you’ll see some industry trends too. I was looking for technology that could help us improve the lives of Rackspace customers.

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Look at the 360 Fly video camera.https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/videos/10153593410979655/ Unfortunately for most of us, there are so many innovations coming soon. Kodak and Ricoh just announced new cameras that have better quality (360 Fly themselves admitted off camera that they have a newer model coming at CES). Translation: buy only what you need and expect it to be obsolete nearly instantly.

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My first try at Blab.IM, including an interview with the investor behind it, Michael Birch, and the founders:
https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10153592874469655 Many of my friends have been pushing me to try this for weeks now. Why? It lets you do video conferences with four participants easily and without software (on the Web). The viral features (it’s very easy to push a discussion you like to Twitter) and chat features are awesome, and you can see just how good a community Blab has here.

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Facebook open sourced React Native, the framework that lets it easily change the UI on its mobile apps. It also lets developers make cross-platform mobile apps. Are you using it? What’s your experience?https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10153590967259655:0

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Gillmor Gang. https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10153581815894655Every weekend a group of us gets together to talk about the nerdy news of the week. Here we tear into Apple’s announcements.

Since then I’ve gotten iOS 9 and love it. My battery on my iPhone 6+ seems to last a lot longer, and my phone is snappier. It fixed a few nagging bugs too (like scrolling through photos in Facebook Messenger is a lot faster), and I love the updates to notifications and other places. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should. Here’s some hidden features in Mashable:https://mashable.com/2015/09/17/ios-9-hidden-features/We’ll do another Gillmor Gang on Saturday morning, probably at 10 a.m., so watch my Facebook for news of that. We’ll wrap up all the Salesforce news (and take a fresh look at iOS 9 on Apple devices too).

Next week? Watch out for a bunch of 3D printing news as Maker Faire arrives in New York next weekend. Have a great week, stay geeky.
 
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I read all my email at [email protected] and anything done in response to this newsletter goes to the top of my inbox. I’m also at +1-425-205-1921 or on Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble. Please let me know how I, or Rackspace, the leading managed cloud company, can be of service to you. Thanks too to Hugh Macleod and team for helping me do art each week for this. We love his work! You can find more athttps://www.gapingvoid.com
 
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