Marc Benioff

Customer records as a subscription. Benioff, an Oracle executive, founded Salesforce in 1999 with Parker Harris and others to deliver sales tracking software through a web browser for a monthly fee, instead of installed systems that took months to set up. The model, later called software as a service, spread to almost every kind of business software. Salesforce's later sprawl of acquisitions and complex products is the other half of the story.