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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff once shared how a meeting with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs led to the idea of Salesforce’s app marketplace and how years later, he ‘gifted’ AppStore.com domain to Apple. In a 2019 interview with TechCrunch, Salesforce CTO and co-founder Parker Harris recalled how the idea of an app store came out of a meeting with Jobs. In 2003, Harris along with Marc Benioff and Dave Moellenhoff, visited Steve Jobs in Cupertino, he said.
Steve Jobs advice to Salesforce founders
During the meeting, Jobs told the trio that to grow Salesforce, they needed to build a cloud software ecosystem. At that time, the idea of an app store was new for Salesforce, which had just launched (in 1999) as an online service to sell software over the internet.
As the conversation moved forward, Benioff asked Jobs what exactly he meant by a cloud ecosystem. To this, Jobs replied that it was up to them to figure out.
The idea stayed with Benioff, and a few years later, during a dinner in San Francisco, he thought of creating an online directory where developers could build and share apps for Salesforce users. Marc Benioff writes in his book, Trailblazer”
“One evening over dinner in San Francisco, I was struck by an irresistibly simple idea. What if any developer from anywhere in the world could create their own applications for the Salesforce platform? And what if we offered to store these apps in an online directory that allowed any Salesforce user to download them?”
Benioff quickly registered the domain AppStore.com to match his idea. However, when he discussed the name with customers, many did not like the name.
Salesforce eventually launched the app marketplace in 2006 under the name AppExchange. In 2007, Salesforce also introduced Force.com, a platform for building and distributing apps through AppExchange.
Meanwhile, AppStore.com remained unused.
5 words from Steve Jobs that led Benioff to gift Apple AppStore.com
In 2008, Benioff attended a major Apple event where Jobs announced the launch of the App Store for iPhone. During the event, Jobs said five words — “I give you App Store” — which surprised Benioff and his team.
After the event, Benioff met Jobs backstage and signed over the AppStore.com domain to Apple.
How App Store helped iPhone crush Nokia phones
The launch of the App Store became a major factor in the iPhone’s success. It created a marketplace for apps, which helped Apple strengthen its hold in the smartphone market and contributed to the decline of companies like Nokia. The Apple App Store then highlighted the importance of software and app ecosystems in the smartphone market, an area where Nokia struggled to compete effectively.
Having said that, while the iPhone didn’t single-handedly kill Nokia, the App Store’s success demonstrated the demand for a wide variety of apps and the value of a user-friendly platform, which Nokia’s Symbian and Windows Phone systems failed to deliver.
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