The Age of Disposable Software

The Age of Disposable Software – Chief Marketing Technologist.

I have a non-green confession to make: I love paper plates.

Paper plates, paper napkins, plastic forks and knives. They’re always fresh and clean. Bring them outdoors on a picnic, no worries of losing or breaking anything. Blithely sully them with cheeseburger and chili dog, potato salad and watermelon — and then simply throw them away. No cleaning, no optimizing the dishwasher. It’s an absolute miracle of modern living.

Now, while I’ve curbed my desire to use paper products forall meals — to protect the environment and my marriage — I still harbor a love for the Zen-like simplicity of disposability.

That carefree power of disposability came to mind as I’ve been preparing aMarketing in the Cloud webinar forMarketingProfs (Tuesday, August 31 at 2PM EDT,click here to register), a fresh take on mymarketing in the cloud post from a couple of years ago.

In reviewing the pros and cons of software-as-a-service (SaaS) — contrasting the “on demand” model of SaaS to traditional “on premise” software installations — I believe thatone of the biggest advantages of SaaS is the option to throw it away.

Throw it away? That might sound a little strange at first. What I mean is that if you choose a particular SaaS package, sayConductor for SEO monitoring and analysis, and then 6 months later you find a new package that you like better, sayBrightEdge,it’s relatively easy to drop one and replace it with the other. (Or vice versa, from BrightEdge to Conductor — I offer no value judgement of either here, just picking an example.)

Continues @http://www.chiefmartec.com/2010/08/the-age-of-disposable-software.html?

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