NET RESULTS:The ridiculous spat ended up being one of the more talked about sideshows of the event

TO PASSING San Francisco motorists, the street-corner protest, complete with placards and encouragements to honk car horns in support, must have looked fairly official – maybe tied to the Occupy Wall Street sympathy protest in the nearby Financial District.

But the milling group of protesters were shouting a strange slogan: “The cloud must go on!” And the placards bore a smiling portrait of the feisty founder and chief executive of Salesforce.com, and the enigmatic words “@Benioff – too innovative for #OOW11?”

The fact that all of this was taking place at the St Regis hotel, right across the street from San Francisco’s Moscone Center, where about 45,000 participants had gathered that week for Oracle’s annual open world conference (#OOW11 on Twitter), was a big hint that this was actually a publicity stunt.

And it was: albeit an angry publicity stunt by this small rival to mammoth Oracle, handed to Salesforce’s Marc Benioff on a platter, by someone who should have known a lot better, Oracle founder and chief executive Larry Ellison.

The spat between the two ended up being one of the more talked about sideshows at Open World after Ellison cancelled Benioff’s scheduled keynote at the event.

Benioff quickly rescheduled to the restaurant in the St Regis, where only about 100 people could fit in (though many times that number formed a hopeful queue outside).

He proceeded to stream the event over Salesforce’s Facebook page. More than 5,000 people checked into the stream during the live broadcast– almost certainly many times the number that would have watched had the speech gone ahead as planned.

Benioff’s main sin was apparently that he had impishly, and rather rudely as he admitted later, called Ellison’s opening keynote the previous Sunday a “new low bar” on Twitter. He then proceeded to re-tweet links to journalists’ stories critical of the keynote.

Never mind that the criticism was, to most minds, fair enough – the keynote was not one of Ellison’s prouder moments, rambling in delivery and short on substance, probably because he generally has little to announce at the start of the event. People wait for his closing conference keynote for any big news the company is going to announce, and for his typically sharp delivery.

As an aside, I think having Ellison give two keynotes, especially an opening keynote the night before the conference proper kicks off, is a bad idea anyway. It dilutes expectation for the closing keynote, and the Sunday Open World slot could be better by going back to Oracle’s previous format of having its president (although now that is two presidents – Safra Katz and Mark Hurd) give an overview of the business year and the outlook.

Many of the best keynotes came from the executives of other companies – notably, Michael Dell of Dell Computer, and John Chambers of Cisco.

For the past couple of years, that has included Benioff, even though his company is an upstart Oracle rival in the software and cloud space. There is further entertainment value in the fact that Benioff is one of the best speakers in the tech industry – always lively and evangelical in delivery.

And he was once one of Ellison’s most promising lieutenants at Oracle. Ellison in turn was at one time a Salesforce.com board member, and a holder of Salesforce shares.

Salesforce, one of the original “cloud” companies, has been on a roll, reflected in the company’s recent Dreamforce conference, also in San Francisco, which drew about the same number of attendees as Open World – a significant achievement.

As it turned out, Ellison’s concluding keynote echoed Benioff’s in content, and some speculated that this was perhaps an additional reason why Benioff was booted off the agenda. In between Ellison’s barbs about Salesforce, which had the audience laughing, he announced Oracle would also be offering its own cloud to customers, and demonstrated new, integrated social network applications.

Both of these announcements got an enthusiastic reception from the audience, but some observers noted that Salesforce was there first, and had a more sophisticated offering, going by Benioff’s restaurant keynote.

During Ellison’s keynote, Benioff kept up an amusing barrage of tweets, including “Did Larry get my slides?” and “Salesforce can not do this. Next Slide. Salesforce can not do this. Next Slide. Salesforce can not do this. Next Slide.”

In the end, the spat was overwhelmed by the news, emerging just as Ellison was finishing his keynote, that Apple co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs had died.

But really, it was a ridiculous spat between two well-honed sparring partners that should never have happened. As Benioff rightly pointed out, he learned the art of verbal fisticuffs from one of the masters – Ellison. Ellison has always been able to dish it out (one reason his keynotes are always so popular), and surely should have been able to take some pointed ribbing from his former protege.

Benioff seemed genuinely bemused and exasperated that instead, he’d been exiled. But in the end, Ellison’s own-goal gave Benioff greater exposure than he would ever have had otherwise at Open World.