What I am concerning with SaaS
SaaS(Software as a service) and cloud computing as the basis is an undoubted hot topic in the year 2008, Google, Zoho, Microsoft are releasing their preview products. SAP is going to publish its medium size enterprise application Business ByDesign as a "Hosted solution" as well. From the long term view, I can imagine that software based on browser will be more and more popular since the speed of broad band WAN is increasing significantly, thus the differentiation of user experience between browser based software and client software are vanishing. Maybe the web OS will be the actual tool for common customers, when logging on you computer or mobile phones, the first application serves you is the browser(Firefox, Chrome, IE…), you may open your online word processors, spead sheets, presentations, etc. There is no need to install any applications in your device, so you are librated from the headaches of software maintanance. What you care only is how to do your work efficiently other than some IT stuff.
The BIG IT giants are heading for this direction, and trying to induce us in there board. However, I still have my concerns about the SaaS. Since the documents and user data are stored in servers, and there are no standard data format followed by the service providers. Users may be hijacked by the cloud service providers, because once you choose a SaaS service, your data are stored in their private data format, it's not easy to transform and move your data to somewhere else. This reduces your options in the market. So in my point of view, if we develop some data standards for these only data storage in SaaS services, and user can easily move from one provider to another, SaaS concepts and techniques my be more successful. But this is still depending on the competition among those service providers, and some day may some kind of "Open" document format will be the de facto of industry standard, then the spring of SaaS is really coming. Let's expecting for that.