Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company—and Revolutionized an Industry

1.8. Play #8: Work Only on What Is Important

We built the first prototype within a month. It didn't take very long because the developers knew sales force automation from their previous experiences. Further, it was a lot easier to build a Web site than to create complicated enterprise software. Our overarching goal was, as the developers said, to "do it fast, simple, and right the first time." The user interface was bare bones almost to a fault, but we wanted the service to be extremely easy to use. It had only the necessary information fields, such as contacts, accounts, and opportunities, which were initially organized by green tabs at the top of the screen. "No fluff," one of our first developers, Paul Nakada, used to say. Exactly like Amazon, ...