Salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff on "The Zune Strategy" of fighting value with price

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.

Customers continue to want visionary products that give them a competitive advantage, not the me-too Zune-type products locking them into these old, proprietary, desktop-driven platforms that are dying off.

A user experience versus value comment heard in the middle of Salesforce.com's Q1 earnings call.

Usability week ending May 22nd

Friday, 20th May, 5:38 PM
Clear #product vision is essential to a holistic #UX, its critical get it done at beginning of an #agile project: http://j.mp/iSuQiE

Thursday, 19th May, 7:29 AM
The online IDs people are using the most to sign in around the web: http://j.mp/jw2pEo #infographic #ux #ui #ia #sso

Tuesday, 17th May, 5:47 PM
There is no sentient human being in the Western world who has little or no regard for his or her personal #privacy: http://j.mp/lzFHlS

Monday, 16th May, 7:10 AM
Money Transmission Act "is a ticking time bomb" for innovative online payment models: http://j.mp/jrLlvi #law #politics #payments

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Usability week ending May 15th

Friday, 13th May, 8:09 PM
#Google Music Beta wants to let users access music anywhere, anytime. Sadly, it’s just not that easy: http://j.mp/jZS35N #ux #usability

Thursday, 12th May, 7:44 AM
Jakob Nielsen -- "Mobile screens are so small that it's a sin to waste space": http://j.mp/iTmVJ8 #ui #ux #design

Wednesday, 11th May, 9:32 PM
Great products and services depend on their users having great experiences. #Social #design aims to explain the why: http://j.mp/ielzoy #ux

Monday, 9th May, 10:58 PM
So how does an engineer get from poetic floating seaweed to a building that can withstand a magnitude-9.0 earthquake?: http://j.mp/j1xHrO

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Usability week ending May 1st

Friday, 29th April, 7:52 PM
Talking about web sites from a #usability standpoint, we often overlook the most important piece--content: http://j.mp/myBvea #ux

Thursday, 28th April, 8:56 AM
What makes a cool URI? A cool URI is one which does not change. Inventor of web shares how to make one: http://j.mp/iOWGeB

Wednesday, 27th April, 11:01 AM
Your taste is why your work disappoints you: http://j.mp/dNE18D #design

Tuesday, 26th April, 11:10 PM
@Siouxsie212 hi, yes, I spent a lot of springs, summers, and falls there.

Tuesday, 26th April, 11:00 PM
"How Good Designers Think" -- Harvard Business Review: http://j.mp/fNHghR #design #UX #usability

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Usability week ending April 24th

Friday, 22nd April, 3:05 PM
Two clear reasons why services get user attention: happiness (enchantment) and utility (solving a problem): http://j.mp/fDvw67 #ux

Friday, 22nd April, 12:27 PM
The dividing line -- #Amazon has moved digital goods to the top of its 'Shop All Departments' list: http://j.mp/hL4iY2

Wednesday, 20th April, 12:13 PM
What becomes possible when one is able to store entire documents in URLs?: http://j.mp/dXYxGU

Tuesday, 19th April, 12:27 PM
The right mentality is a user-centric mentality: http://j.mp/eZnETQ #ux #ia

Monday, 18th April, 3:49 PM
For a #mobile #app to be lovable, it must be useful, usable and desirable: http://j.mp/i7Srvo #ux #iphone #ipad #android

Monday, 18th April, 2:17 PM
#LibreOffice escape from #Oracle shows how open source forking can protect community autonomy from exploitation: http://j.mp/hACStj

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Usability week ending April 17th

Friday, 15th April, 12:11 PM
I love fonts, and Google Web Fonts just keep getting better. Free to use, hosted by Google: http://j.mp/h98YKf #font #design

Friday, 15th April, 9:13 AM
Fascinating #usability testing results from the latest desktop Linux, Ubuntu Unity. Thinking like new users is hard: http://j.mp/f3kfda #ux

Wednesday, 13th April, 8:15 AM
Loads of hidden or little-known features of #Mac OS X. I didn't know about 'proxy icons' or 'pbcopy': http://j.mp/dIwykl #tip

Tuesday, 12th April, 3:34 PM
Details matter -- lessons from reality on the #iPhone tab bar user experience: http://j.mp/fGcUcw

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Usability week ending April 10th

Friday, 8th April, 11:06 AM
Media's ageing audiences: Peggy Sue got old - The Economist http://post.ly/1rwsS

Thursday, 7th April, 3:47 PM
Truth is, predicting the future accurately is pretty tough: http://j.mp/dWePaq #iphone #android #wp7

Thursday, 7th April, 1:10 PM
Users to Developers -- "If you are going to change a standard UI behavior, you better have good reason for it.": http://j.mp/fKKDkS #ux

Wednesday, 6th April, 8:33 AM
11 fundamental guidelines for e-commerce checkout #usability--we saw 430% lift using similar ideas on our store platform: http://j.mp/eaKR8T

Tuesday, 5th April, 11:24 AM
Apple founder Steve Wozniak says tablets are PCs for 'normal people', Steve Job's goal from day one http://post.ly/1r2tf

Monday, 4th April, 12:54 PM
Make the web easy to read -- standard font sizes, active white space, good line height, contrast, no text images: http://j.mp/f1sjbt #ux #ui

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Media's ageing audiences: Peggy Sue got old - The Economist

The noisy disruption of media business models by the internet in the past decade has obscured a profound demographic transformation. Whether they are buying music, listening to the radio, reading newspapers or watching television, media consumers are ageing even more quickly than the overall population. Rather than trying to reverse this trend by attracting younger people, many companies are attempting to profit from the greying of media.

As your audience ages, approachability matters more. Kids see a new technology like a video game: a challenge to figure out. Their elders see it as work.

But the greys have money. As the article notes, "people aged 60 or over spent more on pop-music albums in 2009 than did teenagers or people in their 20s".

This is a strong—though generally overlooked—incentive to make new technologies feel comfortable and familiar.

Apple founder Steve Wozniak says tablets are PCs for 'normal people', Steve Job's goal from day one

"The tablet is not necessarily for the people in this room," Wozniak told the audience of enterprise storage engineers. "It's for the normal people in the world," Wozniak said.

"I think Steve Jobs had that intention from the day we started Apple, but it was just hard to get there, because we had to go through a lot of steps where you connected to things, and (eventually) computers grew up to where they could do ... normal consumer appliance things," Wozniak said.

A "personal computer" can take a lot of forms — the term need not be stuck referencing the Wintel duopoly beige box days. The iPad is arguably the most personal of PCs yet.