Julie Bort/Business Insider
Marc Benioff and Michael Arrington at Disrupt SF
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Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff just let slip some good news for a relatively new product line—Do.com, an online project-management tool.
Google is rolling it out for its engineers, he told attendees at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference today.
Earlier this month, Salesforce.com rolled out a refresh of Do.com, built on technology from its 2011 acquisition of Manymoon.
Do.com is a free, Web-based application that competes directly with a closely watched startup, Asana, the latest project of Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz.
Salesforce.com says that it has thousands of Do.com users already, including some well-known companies like homebuilder Shea Homes.
But Google is a particularly big win—the kind of marquee customer Salesforce.com can use to persuade others to sign up.
Manymoon was originally built on top of Google Apps, improving its task-list features.
Benioff explained today that he thinks direct competition helps competitors, instead of hurting them, pushing each to innovate.
“I don’t look at business as a zero-sum game,” he said.
Interestingly, Benioff is an investor in Asana, though he didn’t seem to realize this until today.
While on stage, interviewer Michael Arrington asked him if he had invested in Asana. At first he said no. Then he said he wasn’t sure because he invests in a fund run by early-stage investor Ron Conway.
Conway, in the audience, confirmed that he’d invested in Asana.
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