I agree with you about the SaaS market (see Is the SaaS Market Broken, or Just Efficient?). You do raise an interesting point – how much attention is there to go around? That’s a big part of the driver of focusing on conversation in this series of articles. Who gets more attention? The companies you talk with, or the ones who talk at you, or even worse – not at all.

Realistically – if you got an hour of attention from each customer, each month/week/whatever, how much better would that be? But that’s only one dimension – attention is great for driving branding and awareness – and also useful for Ries and Trout’s Law of the Mind. The next level of value comes from the trust you can build, leading to collaborative conversations, resulting in gaining insights that your competitors don’t have. That lets you win. It lets you improve your product-market fit, and positions you for a better product-market fit before the (next) market even forms. Trust-based conversations allow you to discover other opportunities.

Great point about people not walking directly up and down the hierarchy of conversation – they absolutely can jump around, into the middle or all the way to the top or bottom. You definitely hit the nail on the head – there are different things you do to engage people that are having different types of conversations – that is the main idea behind applying this notion to your community. My goal is to help folks internalize that a single “social marketing” tactic is only right for a subset of the people in your conversation ecosystem. In one of the next articles, I’ll try and put these conversations in the context of impact on your business. And also how to measure it, so that folks will have some tools for explicit managing (and improving it).

Also – really glad you liked the “downward transitions” part – you’re (again) exactly right – there is a level of commitment that comes with establishing the conversations. And a cost that comes with screwing up (through activity or inactivity).

Thanks again,
Scott

Will they become ubiquitous? Will they in time become the principal way we use applications? I believe so. I don’t know how long that might take, but if you look at the long term implications of a lot of various trends – netbooks, smartphones, remote workers, and most importantly – the rise of the Internet as an alternative to the desktop OS (think about that one), I think there is good reason to believe “as a Service” may not replace all local applications but at some level is is likely to at least a part of every application (think the Apple iTunes App Store).

What might stop or limit the trend? Broadband connectivity in the US. We’re already way behind developed nations in both to the door and wireless bandwidth. In order for real, reliable, robust application suites to appear, the quality of service problem for delivery networks needs to be solved and delivered at a reasonable cost.

But let’s say for a minute that last mile connectivity (something as a Service vendors have little control over) problems are over come in a relatively short period of time. How many as a service applications might the average enterprise end-user have? Many already have 3-5 and they aren’t even aware of it. I’ll make a wild stab and say that if we include line of business applications that are in full time use by only a small number of total users (Like invention submission systems) but available to 1,000′s – I’ll guess something like 20. That might not even include local applications that are clients of as a Service applications at some level.

So, can we imagine full engagement by end-users with 20 applications? No. No matter how wonderful each application is, the only ones we’re likely to be really actively engaged with are those we spend a considerable percentage of our day. The problem is time and attention – we just don’t have enough of either to give more.

A group of us discussed this and other aspects of this emerging paradyme on our first podcast at Haut Tech Conversations. We decided it is likely the as a Service model is going take over much of what is now the “installed base” but it is unlikely that the proliferation of offerings can operate independently. What we see evolving are “ecosystems” of applications that flexibly mix (or mash up to use current terminology) to meet a specific need and are more or less transparent to the end user. That is already happening in the drive to develop only what is core to each service.

When this occurs, the ecoysystem in some way has to provide a point of customer interaction that can filter down to an individual appllication level or spread out to the broader ecosystem (think “why isn’t someone doing this for us?”). This level of interaction is way beyond the current system driven as it is by simple self-interest on the part of a vendor. It says that real communities will evolve out of the muck of say – 12 or so legal applications and a handfull of general productivity applications to give one example.

I know, it is easy to say this is pretty farfetched. I think though, given Moore’s Law, it is at least a desirable outcome if we believe the as a Service model has something critically useful to give to the future and is likely necessary a lot sooner than we may think..