Eric Schmidt CEO and Executive Chairman of Google
The keynote presentation this afternoon at Dreamforce 2011 in San Francisco has been from Eric Schmidt, the CEO and Executive Chairman of Google. He was interviewed by Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com.
During the interview, it became clear that both Google and Salesforce share the same vision for the future of technology – a future that is mobile, global, and social, because “that is the way that people work today”.
In a dig at the traditional computing industry, Eric proposed that Microsoft made a mistake by not anticipating a future that is built around the consumer. Instead, organisations such as Microsoft are built around a model of control and licensing, and they struggle to make the transition to the decentralised and customer-centric view, encapsulated by the social enterprise.
In 1982, Eric Schmidt was one of the first 100 employees at Sun Microsystems at the position of CTO, before leaving to join Novell, and then leaving them to become CEO of Google. He joined Google when they were still a relatively small start-up with great promise but nothing more. Marc Benioff wondered why he made this seemingly risky move, and he responded with a great quote: “Life is short, and therefore you should spend your time working with people that you like. I liked the people that I met at Google, so that’s why I made that decision.”
I certainly agree with this. I have worked with some fantastic people over the years, and in my current role as Head of Sales in UK for Cameleon Software, I am at a company that is naturally sociable, and therefore is a great place to work. The social culture of the company is also reflected in the relationships that we have built with our clients, and also the social technology capabilities that we have created within our platform.
We know that in the new world of the social enterprise, success depends the culture of organisations to fully adopt a social mandate with employees, clients, and partners. As we have learnt at Dreamforce this week, vendors such as Salesforce.com and Cameleon Software have built the social tools. But that only goes so far – it is then up to the organisations themselves to adapt and use these tools, and hence to become the successful Social Enterprise.
