So we've been talking about Live a lot at Microsoft lately. I'm lucky enough to have seen some of the latest thinking coming out of Redmond recently - the paper that is essentially the follow up to Ray Ozzie's famed memo. I might be overestimating the power of this piece of paper but for some reason I am quite nervous carrying it around in my briefcase. Certainly some people I mentioned it to agree that I could possibly take off to a desert island with a sum of cash had I chosen to post it on ebay. Not sure. But for some bizarre reason I did feel a bit like a character out of an Ian Fleming novel engaged in industrial espionage while in that hotel in Copenhagen. Probably as close to being a Bond girl as I'm going to get.

We've just embarked on a plan to survey our ISV partner community about their thoughts on SaaS as a Disruptive Technology. Bower and Christensen wrote a great paper for Harvard Business Review about Catching the Wave back in 1995. The principles of this paper twelve years later are still as valid. They talk about technology innovations having different performance trajectories - the rate at which the product improves over time. Sustaining technologies "give customers something more or better than they already have" while disruptive technologies "introduce different attributes from the one mainstream customers historically value". Do pioneers of new technology dominate the market? How do established companies innovate and invest in disruptive technologies when the market isn't proven?

Just one of the many things occupying our time at the moment. There's no doubt that SaaS has all the attributes of a Disruptive Technology. Question is - how much is it really worth?

I met with one of the lead analysts from IDC today. We were talking about how to quantify the opportunity - particularly for ISV's interested in partnering with Microsoft and BT. We're hoping to produce some revenue scenario's for application developers in the coming weeks ready for the launch of our partner program some time in April.

Interestingly one of the papers Robert brought along to the meeting is called "Show Me the Money" where Matt Davis at IDC ranks the Top 10 Next Generation Services. This was based on a US survey in 2006 where consumers were asked about their willingness to pay for applications - ranging from "not interested if it were free" up to "very interested if the cost was over $20/mth".

Guess what came out on top? Applications that control lighting, heating and other utility functions remotely (from a PC or wireless device) were thought to be highest revenue generating. Wheras applications that create personalised user profiles that deliver TV programs, internet contect and music to the household came in lowest.

Obviously useful in a B2C environment. Now all we've got to do is the same exercise for B2B.