Top 25 Parker Harris Quotes

What I’ll take credit for is finding visionary people in the company, or bringing them in, and then empowering them to help me.

My favourite moments at Dreamforce are when people come up and thank me randomly. It’s a selfish time for me, as I get lots of positive feedback.

Businesses can’t afford to react to what their customers want; they need to anticipate their needs.

We’re paying a lot of attention to the iPad. But we’re expanding that to a tablet focus.

I still believe heavily that we have to be careful about having this ego and hubris as a successful corporation, that we should do it all. Because then I think we start to fail our customers and we’re too focused on taking over the world.

I remember my school had some of the first Apple IIs in North Carolina. I remember, when I first started using them, we were using a cassette tape to store programs because we didn’t have floppy disk drives.

Looking at the trends that we have gone through as a company, where we started the company, it’s all about cloud computing, and we’re still cloud computing. And then we went through this space on social. When Facebook came out, that was amazing.

When you come to San Francisco, we want you to know where Salesforce is.

Where I’m focused now is how I get more women leaders. We decided not to just look outside the company for great women to hire, but to help women rise up through the ranks internally.

We’re a very iterative company, so we jump on basically all new technology.

I took a detour to France in my senior year in high school. So that’s part of what ended up sending me, actually, to Middlebury because I went to school with people who were more from the Northeast.

Social computing is doing what agile methodology is doing to our process – it’s breaking down our visibility.

If you want a database, you don’t go out and say you’re going to write it. I see platforms as going in that direction.

Phones are a big deal, but tablets are an even bigger deal. So we’re doing a lot of design work and experimentation around the tablet experience.

Our output and continued success is all about our culture. Ours has to be highly collaborative, and we have company-wide events and processes to make sure everyone stays aligned.

We actually went public partly because we wanted companies to realise we were not going away.

I grew up loving computers and math, actually. I also loved English literature and French, but I became obsessed with computers when the Apple II was coming out.

We are building technology to keep up with what’s happening in the world. It’s transforming the way people are working. We’re bringing the enterprise to the world.

I grew up in North Carolina. My father was a salesperson; he sold textiles.

Wearable technology is not just for consumers. It creates a tremendous opportunity for businesses, too.

By flattening time and space, social computing and business is unlocking credible potential within business. For example, individuals and organizations that weren’t connected before are now connected together.

One of our first jobs was at Saba Software. We were helping them build their products for the cloud. We wanted to build our own product and move away from consulting. We were looking for a change. The CEO of Saba introduced me to Marc Benioff.

After the dotcom boom blew up, it increased the focus on questions like, ‘Why should I trust you to help run my business? How do I know you’re not going to go away like every other company?’ That was hard. We had to keep proving ourselves.

I have employees that are, you know, other types of diversity, coming to me and saying ‘Well, why aren’t we focused on these other areas as well?’ and I said yes, we should focus them, but, you know, the phrase we use internally is, ‘If everything is important, then nothing is important.’

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