Predicting the Next Decade of Enterprise Software

Using my Google Reader I am connected to many blogs. One of them is Tim O'Reilly. (Yes the one that wrote some of the programmers books your read...)
O'Reilly writes so much that I can not read him often. In on month he wrote about 80 posts. I guess he takes it very seriously, and it is part of his job...

Anyway, couple of days ago he published an interesting post titled: "Predicting the Next Decade of Enterprise Software". It is about a survey results that was done by Sandhill.com. These are some of their results that I find more interesting:

• Individuals that influenced the most on the last decade: Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux, see wiki-link)  and  Marc Benioff (salesforce.com - CRM on demand... see wiki-link). Bill Gates got only 17%.
• Not surprising - 62% thought that Google was the company with the greatest likelihood of affecting enterprise software in the next ten years.
  But surprising - IBM wasn't even one of the choices ?!
• 73% think SaaS (Software as a Service, see wiki-link) will be viewed as a success in ten years, while only 7% think that of Web 2.0. Tim disagrees with the second part, because He says that "SaaS is part of Web2.0 concept".

Personally, I think that it is only an illusion that "SaaS is part of Web2.0 concept". I believe the opposite: "Web2.0 is part of SaaS concept", because talking about Web2.0 is like talking about The New Economy - it is quite meaningless but very risky (I talked about it in my previous post - Internet 2.0? Internet 20.0!). But SaaS is a real business model that can, and in some places do, actually work.

Here is a link to the original post with some additional info: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/predicting_the.html.

Funny thing, Tim calls this survey an "info-porn" but with still interesting results..

Vladi