I have great respect for Clayton Christensen, who has done serious work putting real meaning into the term "disruptive innovation". He's quoted in the latest Newsweek article on Skype, saying:
Still, the novel pay schemes "are hugely interesting," says Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who cites both Kazaa and Skype as great examples of the "disruptive innovations" he studies. "It's almost never the technology itself that paralyzes the incumbent—it's that the incumbent has a system for making money that's irrelevant to the new guys."
The combination of companies growing up after the bubble burst, dealing with recession and market pressure by using free software and then reducing customers' cost to use through "rightsized" pricing (moving amortization costs of hardware and software from the customer to the vendor, and reducing overall management costs through centralization) has produced some very fit organisms - not unlike biological organisms that have deveoped in impoverished environments, they may be tougher than the incumbents of enterprise software.
Axel Shultze of BlueRoads has said that no one originally set out to get to the current state of SaaS - it was a series of changes to fit the customer environment that led the industry here. It will be very interesting to see where the intersection of pay-as-you go and ad-funded software business models leads us next. I think Darwin would be having fun right now watching this industry evolve in real time.
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