Marc Benioff Highlights Man, Machines, And Social Networks In Dreamforce Keynote

A theme is emerging in Marc Benioff’s keynote: Man, machines, and social networks are part of the next evolution in technology and compare to the movements of the past 40 years dating back to the mainframe.

The talk began with a video that featured a woman who tells her car she wants to go to work. It showed a man using an immersive environment and gestures to command a network of automated operations.

Benioff can’t go too far. He showed how the office changes with the use of social technologies. But he used that as a springboard to discuss how companies such as General Electric are thinking most about how to connect machines and people into a social network.

Machines are getting their own social networks. They are connecting. They are making friends. They are liking each other when a machine in their network shares an issue.

VMware showed at VMworld how Socialcast activity streams can be used to connect hosts and virtual machines in a data center.

Here’s the switch we are seeing. We are starting to see how society will some day interact more with software than people. Everything will be a node. That future is emerging now as we see how the cloud is being used to direct machines. Like the self-driving car Benioff featured in his keynote this morning.