‘The Zune Strategy’

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, discussing his company’s quarterly results:

Our flagship, Sales Cloud, continued to crush the competition in the quarter. Microsoft’s desperate strategy of underfunding, pricing with undifferentiated and highly proprietary products basically has had the same impact on our business as the Windows tablet and Zune did against the iPad and iPod. We call Microsoft’s strategy, “the Zune strategy”.

It’s the concept that they can take a proprietary, undifferentiated offering at a lower price and somehow make an impact on a high-value, highly differentiated product that’s loved by customers. Microsoft has not changed our exceptional win rates or affected our average selling price with this Zune strategy.

Spot-on critique of everything wrong at Microsoft.

★ Monday, 23 May 2011