Heard and Overheard

Musings at DCI's Real-Time Enterprise Conference and elsewhere:
"The reason some [ERP vendors] want to claim that they're CRM vendors is that the ERP market is shrinking." --Tom Siebel, CEO and chairman, Siebel Systems Inc.

"Microsoft will take the first opportunity to make Web services proprietary. They are not altruistic in this regard. The only reason Microsoft introduced .Net is that Java was such a stunning success and Microsoft wanted to blunt that, because they don't own it." --Michael Stonebraker, Ph.D., Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science

"[Oracle Corp. CEO] Larry Ellison is running around eating humble pie, saying, "We don't have the best, we have good enough--but it's well integrated." --Aaron Zornes, executive vice president and director, application delivery strategies, META Group

"The CRM feature wars are over. It's now all about usability." --Brad Wilson, vice president of marketing, CRM products, PeopleSoft Inc.

"Real-time enterprises don't need a massive transformation. It's guerrilla warfare, not all out war. Is it easy? No. But you can address easier projects first, then take on the difficult projects later." --Vinod Khosla, general partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers