The Return of the Co Show
Salesforce
The big news this month is Bret Taylor being promoted to co-CEO of Salesforce. In the past Marc Benioff shared the role with Keith Block, but this time it’s a Product rather than a Sales person so it will be interesting to see if things go any differently.
Jack Dorsey also stepped down as CEO of Twitter, to be replaced by Parag Agrawal. Why isn’t this in the Other section you might ask? If you scroll down a little in the linked story, you’ll see that “Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor will become the chairman of the board, succeeding Patrick Pichette”. When I added this to this newsletter, I had a comment about it being another step in the inexorable rise of Taylor, and wondering how long he’d be content to sit in Marc Benioff’s shadow. Turned out to be less than 12 hours, so good job I didn’t hit publish!
Marc Benioff has invested $20 million in you.com, a search engine that intends to take on Google, founded by former Salesforce Chief Scientist Richard Socher.
The re-imagined Dreamforce hit New York. Diginomica has a great article on the safety side of the event. Another example of how things have changed - there’s no mention of any of the content or announcements of the event, just how it was staged while putting everyone at minimum risk. More information on what was delivered during the event is available. This has quite a bit of focus on the safety angle too, but also plenty on sustainability, including the rebrand to Net Zero Cloud.
And finally for the Salesforce ecosystem, if you’ll allow me a moment to toot my own horn, Credera acquired a majority stake in BrightGen, the company I’ve worked for for just over 13 years.
Other
Ericsson is buying Vonage for $6.2 billion.
AWS experienced a multi-hour outage, which meant almost everything else did too.
While it might feel like the skills shortage is most acute in the Salesforce ecosystem, it’s being felt everywhere. To take the load off the IT department, SAP jumps on the no/low code bandwagon and another cohort of citizen developers can’t be far behind.
Me
One each of serious and satirical posts from me since the last stack.
I let my imagination run wild again on Salesforce++ programming, and then took a look at the difference between calling methods/functions in Apex and JavaScript.