Knuckledusters donned in software great war

IS the prosaic world of enterprise software due to be the next destination for a technology dust-up in the great tradition of Intel versus AMD, Sun versus Microsoft, SCO versus IBM and the rest? Yup.

Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff has always kept the knuckledusters handy in case of meeting the opposition. An avid reader of The Art of War by Chinese general Sun Tzu, the bear-like CEO is usually ready to rumble when the suggestion of a competitor doing anything right is made.

Some of his reported barbs aim at his old employer Oracle.

"When I was at Oracle, we watched Computer Associates buy all those mainframe software companies and milk them for their license revenue," he once said. "I never thought that's what Oracle would be doing one day, and yet, here it is."

And:

"Following the proposed acquisition of Siebel by Oracle many existing Siebel employees may be concerned about their career prospects... We want to offer them an alternative to an environment of declining commissions, confused customers and uncertainty around career viability."

He sums up his attitude with this burst of testosterone:

"We believe in the art of war. We are trying to get our competition to attack us with angry, virulent energy, so we can transform that into larger market share."

With SAP he is ever-keen to remind his audience of SAP's unwillingness to name CRM installations.

Having dismissed Salesforce as "not even a competitor" in the past, however, the usually conservative German giant may be gearing up for its own war of words.

SAP VC Jeff Nolan runs an excellent blog that often strays way off the ERP behemoth's position. This week, however, he aims his frustration fair and square at the Salesforce marketing machine.

Describing a Salesforce exec "prattling on" at a conference and describing multi-tenant hosted software as Salesforce's "religion", Nolan wound himself up for a final assault.

"Lastly, I find it rather unsettling when your competitor can't be intellectually honest about anything of value that their competitor is doing; when they are in constant selling mode that is the equivalent to a young child demanding attention and validation at every turn… As a professional in this business you try to have the attitude that the Valley is a small place and irrespective of the competitive dynamics between companies you try to maintain a level of respect for your peers. My experience last night just pissed me off and eroded the goodwill that had been building up with my interactions with other execs from the company."

Respect for the opposition? Is this what the technology industry has come to? No wonder old prizefighters like Bill "The Bloat" Gates and Scott "Big Teeth" McNealy are leaving the ring.

So, come on Salesforce, are you going to take this lying down? µ