As a person that had a front row seat for allll this drama for 10 years at Siebel, there are a few wrinkles in your story.

First Tom Siebel, Marc Benoif and Larry Ellison were fiercely competitive. Twice at Siebel, we tried to launch sales.com but it was too early for some of the underlying tech still and the user experience wasn’t great. Marc stole our idea, some of our people, our data model, and put great marketing behind it to make it stand out. He focused on the mid market which Siebel was too expensive for. And he made it so you didn’t have to do a purchase order, sales and customer service folks could buy it on a credit card. So Siebel customers found they had Salesforce deployments as “shadow IT”. And he did customer wins campaign forcing all customers to commit to a press release when they signed on.

As for Siebel hating the reporters—that is a complete lie and what prompted me to reply here. We had huge departments for analysts and PR. And those folks were fantastic at what they did. We were far more conservative though, where we didn’t announce customers before they were installed…. Partly because professional services was usually 3-4x the cost of the sale and that was also competitive. Salesforce had no services, so they were more bullish.

And if you think that was drama, you should dig into when Larry bought Tom’s company in 06!!

The competition between these three billionaires shook the valley regularly. But at the end of the day, I think they’re actually good friends.