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Salesforce.com CEO a Bit Smugger Than Usual Today

Software is dead.”

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, June 2000

softwaredeadguySalesforce.com has seen a fair bit of its value evaporate amid the economy’s downward spiral. But the same cannot be said of its business, which is apparently doing quite well. Posting fourth-quarter earnings today, Salesforce.com (CRM) reported record revenue of nearly $290 million with annual sales exceeding $1 billion. Pretty damn good for a cloud computing company weathering a recession. Far better than the Street had expected. Consensus estimates had Salesforce.com earning seven cents a share. Instead, it earned 11 cents a share. “Salesforce.com is proud to be the first billion dollar cloud computing company,” said salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. “At a time when capital is precious, big-ticket software purchases just don’t make sense.”

Seems Benioff’s infamous “software is dead” pronouncement is slowly coming to pass.

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John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »

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