Fuel for Web 2.0

So I've been doing a lot of thinking over the last 2 weeks about Software As A Service. Sam Ramji stimulated my thoughts. If you don't know what I mean, it’s a "pay as you play" software subscription model where the software is primarily hosted elsewhere.  This is, of course, the next step in the evolution of software and how you both use it and pay for it.  If you think back we have seen this around for quite some time and it has previously been very successful in niches. 

However broad scale adoption has generally failed, hence the Dot Com bust. I've heard a plethora of differing reasons why SAAS hadn't succeeded in the past, but I think, and this is my own opinion, the trump answer is that consumers and businesses simply weren't ready to pay that way. 

What has changed this time around?   

• Broadband usage is up significantly, allowing consumers a much richer and more interactive experience in hosted scenarios.
• Successful implementations of SAAS from companies like Concur and Salesforce.com.
• Technology and standards have also evolved, a good example is Web Services, (WS-*), where there is broad industry acceptance of WS-I standards and the use of XML. 
  • This allows many companies to build their software and guarantee interoperability with software built by other companies. 
• Large scale calamities this past year have affected businesses in such a way that they now see the advantage of a hosted model for failover and business continuity.

Hence, businesses are now letting go of the excuse that they don’t trust someone else to host/manage their business data and IP. Is this the fuel for what many have coined as Web 2.0?