Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, reveals why he gave Steve Jobs the App Store domain and trademark registration in an interview with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Television's "Bloomberg West."
He has probably given me more help and more advice than just about anybody. When I get in trouble you know and I kinda get lost in my own vision. I've been fortunate to be able to go see him and he's been able to show me the future a couple times where I got I think a little bit lost for forest from the trees. One really good example of that happened around 2003.
I went down to talk to him and brought a few members of my executive team with us and he said something really exciting. He goes, look you have a fantastic enterprise application here but you've got to build an ecosystem. So, to us, we went back and we're like, well we don't know how to do that. That was like a zen kōan. How do we build an ecosystem? So we designed this whole technology that we called App Store. Which was the ability to basically buy these apps, run them in SalesForce and when we launched it we actually called it App Exchange, and you can see it at AppExchange.com, but we liked the App Store name so much that we bought the URL and we trademarked it.
I was in the audience when he announced App Store and I went up to him and said "I have a gift for you. I'm going to give you the trademark and URL because of the help you gave me in 2003."
He has probably given me more help and more advice than just about anybody. When I get in trouble you know and I kinda get lost in my own vision. I've been fortunate to be able to go see him and he's been able to show me the future a couple times where I got I think a little bit lost for forest from the trees. One really good example of that happened around 2003.
I went down to talk to him and brought a few members of my executive team with us and he said something really exciting. He goes, look you have a fantastic enterprise application here but you've got to build an ecosystem. So, to us, we went back and we're like, well we don't know how to do that. That was like a zen kōan. How do we build an ecosystem? So we designed this whole technology that we called App Store. Which was the ability to basically buy these apps, run them in SalesForce and when we launched it we actually called it App Exchange, and you can see it at AppExchange.com, but we liked the App Store name so much that we bought the URL and we trademarked it.
I was in the audience when he announced App Store and I went up to him and said "I have a gift for you. I'm going to give you the trademark and URL because of the help you gave me in 2003."