Top 20 Parker Harris Quotes

What I see now is the consumerisation of IT. I don’t want my company to tell me that I have to use a BlackBerry or I have to use a Windows phone. I just want to use the phone I want and have it all work.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

When we started, we thought about the scale of the Internet – if everyone was using the service at the same time, what would that look like?

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

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

We do a lot of outbound work where we’re talking about the future. As we get involved with these new products, it helps us have a platform to talk about where the future is going.

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.

People think floating should be the easiest and happiest time for a company, but it’s actually really hard. We were meant to think we’d won – we’d gone public and could go on to new things. But we were only just getting started.

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

Diving into data has never been more critical for businesses in order to make fast, accurate decisions about customer behaviors and needs and drive holistic business knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

I think the legacy is really the company that we built. That’s what makes me happy. I’m a very simple person, so that’s all I really need.