Did Salesforce.com and Marc Benioff copy Yammer?

If you’ve been to Dreamforce, Benioff would use these slogans:

In 1999, you asked:

… Why can’t Software Be Like Amazon?

In 2009, you asked:

… Why can’t Enterprise Software Be Like Facebook?

So did Marc Benioff copy Facebook or Yammer?

It’s no secret Salesforce’s Chatter product wants to become "Facebook for business”.

Memories of Bill Gates

Remember the days of MS-DOS when Bill Gates attended a trade show and saw XEROX PARC’s (Palo Alto Research Center) version of “Windows”? It was the beginning of click, double click, scroll, scroll bars, resize, minimize, maximize.. all within a window interface using a mouse?   Bill would later go back to his team, all excited, and proclaim, “I want that!”.  The rest is history.

Yammer was launched back in 2008 at the TechCrunch50 event, where Marc Benioff was a judge.  Yammer won the top prize at the conference.  (see the snippet at the beginning of the video)

Fast forward 3 years. 

Salesforce has SuperBowl ads, and now Yammer has a Youtube video produced at a fraction of the cost.

Approximately 6 million dollars for a two-30 second ads may be a lot of money, when you consider the potential 100 million targeted viewers.

But then again, go ask entertainer Justin Bieber who has over 430 million views for a single video!  I doubt he spent 3 million dollars on that video. 

Take a look at the Youtube video below produced by Yammer… what do you think the message is?

A mixture of jealousy?  Worried?

Or just poking some fun in the world of enterprise software?