Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff delivers the Dreamforce keynote, via webcast

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is in classic form this morning during the keynote at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, roaming the Moscone Center floor and sounding at times like a preacher as he talks about the company’s latest offerings in cloud computing and social networking.

“We need to beware of the false cloud,” he said, showing an Oracle slide. “Because the false cloud, ladies and gentlemen, is not efficient! It is not democratic! It is not economical! It is not environmental! It is not the future. Because these technologies are not just bleeding from one to the next.

“You didn’t see the mainframe bleed into the minicomputer, the minicomputer bleed into the PC, the PC bleed into mobile, mobile bleed into tablet.”

He continued, “When Bill Gates tried to say, ‘Oh, well, Windows can run on your phone,’ that didn’t work out too well. Not a lot of Windows Phones here today, is there? No, there’s not. Because you’ve gotta cut and start again every time there’s a new paradigm.”

Benioff also lauded HP for getting out of the PC business, saying that “smartphones and tablets are taking over.”

Earlier this week, Microsoft offered a new cash incentive for customer-relationship management customers to switch from Salesforce and other competitors to Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM Online service.

At Microsoft’s partner conference last month, the company’s chief operating officer, Kevin Turner, said Microsoft has “got this humongous pacifier to stick in the mouth of Marc Benioff called Dynamics CRM Online. Which is a really, really beautiful thing for us, for both partners and Microsoft.”

At the time, Benioff reportedly replied to Turner’s remark with a comment on Google+ linking to the Wikipedia page for “phallic stage,” before taking the link down.

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