Marc Benioff at Milken: Microsoft Must Regain Its ‘Beginner’s Mind’

LOS ANGELES — Pity Microsoft. The technology company may be working to repair its image under a new CEO, but on the conference circuit, it’s still very much a punching bag.

At a panel on “disruption” at the Milken Institute Global Conference Tuesday -- the high-profile confab of finance executives, government officials, celebrities and other power players -- at least one prominent technology executive held up Microsoft once again to warn of the dangers of companies growing too big, insular and comfortable.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff took an unprompted shot at the software giant by explaining that the company had lost its entrepreneurial mindset.

When founders start a company, he explained, they continually ask: What's possible? What technology can be used in a novel way to solve a problem? Strong companies maintain those virtues as they expand over time. The complacent ones grow defensive and begin to shun risk in hopes of maintaining their position in the marketplace.

“Microsoft is a great example. Their biggest issue in the past 10 years is that they lost their beginner’s mind,” he said. “They have to regain their beginner’s mind.”

It's a mandate for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who laid out his vision last week in his first conference call with analysts since taking the top job in February. His goal, as he said at least four times during the call (the WSJ counted), is for Microsoft to become a “mobile-first, cloud-first” company.

Benioff said Tuesday that Microsoft needed to abandon its “Windows-everywhere mantra,” the strategy popularized by former CEO Steve Ballmer that called for Microsoft’s operating system to run on every PC, phone, tablet and other device in a consumer's life.

That strategy still exists in some ways, as TIME reported earlier this month. But the successful launch of Microsoft’s Office for iPad suite, a project underway before Nadella took office, is also a prominent sign Microsoft is now more willing to work across platforms, analysts say.

Still, don't look for any praise from Benioff. The Salesforce founder and chairman has never been shy about expressing his feelings about Microsoft. At TechCrunch's Disrupt conference in September, he described the company as being "such a disaster," only Bill Gates could fix it.

He couldn't resist taking another crack at Ballmer Tuesday, describing Microsoft's flat stock performance during the former CEO's reign as a failure.

"If you look at Microsoft's stock price over Steve Ballmer's tenure, it's not something he's going to put as No. 1 on his resume," he said, before returning to his point about the need for an entrepreneurial mindset. "They lost their beginner's mind. You can't just keep repeating these mantras over and over again for 10 or 20 years as if the world hasn't changed."

This post is part of LinkedIn's coverage of the Milken Institute Global Conference. For more, follow along here. Photo: Milken Institute/Flickr.