Zoho CEO has come out publicly to comment on the statements made by Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce on the occasion of the launch of Force.com in which Benioff compared Salesforce to Microsoft and said “They hate everybody and we love everybody, and that’s pretty much the difference. We even love Microsoft. … This is our core strategy, love.”
Sridhar, CEO of Salesforce has accussed that Benioff is not allowing Salesforce onto Force.com, has tried to stop Salesforce users to migrate to Zoho CRM by providing false information and tried but failed to acquire Zoho. Wow!! that’s too much for the message of love and openness. According to Sridhar:
That’s when I got the full measure of the man: Benioff told me he could not permit us to play on the AppExchange as things stood, but he would be happy to acquire us. We had several rounds of meetings on this, finally I told him I really don’t see any cultural compatibility between the companies. He changed tack and repeatedly tried to get us to discontinue Zoho CRM, in return we would get to play on AppExchange. I was furious because both Benioff and his team clearly knew we had a CRM offering going into this engagement, and if they had set this as a pre-condition for us to integrate into AppExchange, we would never have put in the resources we did.
Since then, Salesforce has repeatedly tried to block customers from migrating to Zoho CRM, by telling them (falsely) that they cannot take their data out of Salesforce until their contract duration is over. We have emails from customers recounting this.
[via CNET]
