Charlie Rose Talks to Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff

How do you describe Salesforce to people who don’t understand it?
Well, Salesforce is a company that really pioneered the cloud. It’s kind of Amazon or EBay or Google, but this is using those exact same technologies to run your business. And businesses up to this point really have had to buy their own software and build their own data centers and hook it all up themselves. Our message is very simple: Hey, if you can buy a book on Amazon, if you can do an auction on EBay, if you can do a search on Google, you can run your business the same way. You just go right in.

You’ve been on the warpath against software for how long?
Well, that’s certainly been our pitch now for 13 years. Software: It’s got the line through it. What we’re trying to do is to make the case that we can dramatically lower the cost of business. And the way to dramatically lower the cost of business is by dramatically lowering the cost of IT. And all we do is follow around all these smart young guys, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brinn. And whatever they do, we’re kind of copying it, but for business. We’re not the inventors. We’re not the creators of social networking. But when we see something like social networking, we go, “Well, this is great.” Twitter? Wow. Facebook? A billion people know how to use this app, and they didn’t have to read a manual.