Salesforce - the company that declared the end of software - Founded in a rented apartment in 1999 with a crossed-out word on a badge; the customers' objection was the word control, and it was the right objection, and they bought it anyway.

Salesforce is an American cloud software company founded in San Francisco in 1999 by Marc Benioff and three programmers, whose subscription-delivered customer relationship management established the software-as-a-service model.

In March 1999 a former Oracle executive and three programmers began work in a rented one-bedroom apartment on Telegraph Hill on a piece of sales software that would not be installed, would not be upgraded by the customer, and would be paid for monthly. Benioff called the mission the end of software and wore the word crossed out on a badge. The money came from himself and from his former boss, Larry Ellison, not from venture capital - and when investors did look, they insisted he also sell a packaged version, because nobody believed the hosted one would be accepted.

The objection deserves recording exactly, because it was the right one. People said companies would never let anyone else hold their customer data, and, an early executive remembered, the word control came up a lot. That is the objection that recurs through this whole history - who holds the record, who can reach it, who can be compelled - raised at the moment the industry decided to hand the record over anyway. The customers were correct about what they were giving up and bought it regardless, because not running the software was worth more to them than controlling it.

The company listed in 2004, opened a marketplace for third-party applications in 2005 that made the platform something others built on, and coined and then wore out the phrase cloud computing. It is now a component of the Dow, with revenue above forty billion dollars, and it owns among other things the Slack workspace and the MuleSoft integration layer through which a great deal of enterprise data now moves. One small fact says how far it has travelled from the apartment: it runs its own autonomous system on the internet, like a carrier.

The end of software did not arrive; software moved. What ended was the customer's possession of it, and every subscription, every terms-of-service change and every account lockout since is a consequence of the trade made in 1999. The Starlink entry records a battlefield governed by a vendor's terms of service. The path from there back to a badge with a word crossed out is shorter than it looks.

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