Google Maps Bike There…for a safer, healthier, happier world. :-)

Marc Benioff is the chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, an uber-successful and still-growing software company headquartered in San Francisco. If there was one company that I would say is even remotely similar to Google, it would be Salesforce.com.

Why?

Because it’s clear to me that Benioff wants to win; he wants to change the world of software. More specifically, he wants to bring about “The End of Software,” and that will be delivered via “software as a service,” or SaaS. Google is a growing SaaS provider, though they haven’t been as in your face about it as has Salesforce.com.

And Benioff is not shy about letting people know that he intends for his company to lead the way. He has a vision for the future, and that future is exactly where he’s taking us. We can go actively, passively, or kicking and screaming, but we’re going. Benioff and Salesforce.com are going to see to it.

I believe all of us bicycle and walking and mass transit advocates should be this confident—this bold. We don’t need to be showpersons or uber-marketers, but we do need to believe that our vision of the future is the correct one, and that that future is exactly where we intend to take our friends and family, our neighborhoods, towns, cities, states, countries, and planet.

Benioff is one of those Silicon Valley types—smart, brash, bold, and some other words that folks have used to describe him. (more)  

But I like him. Or, at least, I like the character he plays on TV.

I think that type of positive confidence can be infectious, and it can help win people to our cause. For me, I can’t say I’d get all that excited about software as a service (SaaS), but I can get very excited about cycling, and walking, and good urban design, and vibrant communities.

Benioff and Salesforce.com are in the news again because they just announced a new partnership with Google to provide more application integration stuff. In the video at the link, Benioff had this to say:

I don’t have time or patience for the status quo…for people who are trying to control innovation or stop the future.

I like this sentiment. A lot.

It’s what I’d like to tell car people when they try to stop us from improving our streets and our lives.

“No! We’re done with standing still. We’re making things happen right now. We’re not gonna wait another day.”

I feel like many of us advocates still feel timid about declaring openly that we’ve set out to change the world for the better. My message with this post is, “Don’t be timid.”

Bike lanes on auto-dominated roads are good progress, and necessary, but they’re not sufficient, and we should constantly challenge ourselves to demand more and better facilities. We should not want “equal” facilities – we should want more and better for bikers and walkers and mass transit riders than for automobile drivers. It’s time to start evening things out a little bit. Road Diet needs to be a very common term in our collective lexicon.

I think there are some interesting parallels where Salesforce.com and the rest of the fledging SaaS industry was about ten years ago, and where the bicycling/walking/new urbanist movement is today. Benioff used to talk about “The End of Software.” He sounded like a lunatic just ten short years ago. But he was confident in his vision, and look at where we are now: Saas has obviously emerged as a viable technology. The hottest software companies on the planet are either SaaS providers, or are trying to be.

SaaS: Ten years ago, Benioff was selling a pretty good thing.
Cycling: Today, we’re selling a great thing.

SaaS: Ten years ago, Benioff seemed pretty sure of his success.
Cycling: Today, many of us are certain of our success.

SaaS: Ten years ago, people scoffed at Benioff’s phrase, “The End of Software”.
Cycling: Today, people scoff at the idea of The End of Cars.

SaaS: Today, there are a lot fewer people who scoff at the idea of “The End of Software.”
Cycling: Ten years from now, there will be a lot fewer people who scoff at the idea of The End of Cars.

No more status quo.