Forbes has updated its Most Innovative Companies chart to reveal what it considers the most innovative companies in the world. The ranks buck some expectations and give enterprise-focused Salesforce the top spot where frequent darling of the list, Apple, is at fifth. Amazon, Intuitive Surgical, and QQ creator Tencent all rank higher.
Salesforce chief Marc Benioff squared off against Microsoft in an earnings call late last week that boiled Microsoft's more recent failures to a single method. Calling it the "Zune strategy," he argued that Microsoft kept repeating the strategy it took with its self-designed but largely unsuccessful MP3 player, expecting different results. Along with failing to topple Salesforce's Sales Cloud with CRM Dynamics, Microsoft had tried to push Windows tablets and the Zune as iPad and iPod rivals without having anything special beyond the brand name and price.
Dell on Monday published a study it had conducted in hopes of steering companies away from tablets. The results, conducted by Forrester in February, had just eight percent of workers considering an iPad or Android tablet one of the two devices they'd want to have. A similar amount wanted a Windows tablet, but demand for smartphones and computers ranged from 41 percent to 59 percent.
Information Appliance Associates has announced PocketMac Backup for SalesForce, an application used to backup a user's SalesForce data. The program is able to automatically grab contacts from a SalesForce account, and save them to Address Book every 15 minutes. This ensures access to SalesForce information without an Internet connection.
Salesforce, a major corporation responsible for developing CRM software and related products, may be on the verge of a switching all of its computers from PCs to the Mac platform, an unidentified source claims. The company is currently said to have an agreement with Dell, but as licenses expire, its IT department is allegedly planning to replace each PC with a new Mac. The reason for this is security, as the company is said to favor the extra expense of buying Macs over the even greater costs it is paying to safeguard Windows systems. Some 4,000 computers would have to be replaced.
The iPhone is gaining popularity with businessmen and corporations in spite of its focus, Reuters writes. The phone is nominally a combination of an iPod with typical smartphone applications, but its execution is such that major companies -- like SAP and Salesforce -- have allowed sales and finance teams to use it for work outside the office. SAP recently announced that it would release an iPhone version of its customer relationship management software, but more importantly, before new versions were available for traditional "business" phones such as the RIM BlackBerry or the Palm Treo. The cause of this was reportedly SAP's own salespeople, who were demanding the iPhone due to ease-of-use.
