A very interesting guest post on GigaOM this morning. Greg Olson, CEO of Coghead, a web-based system that allows users to create business applications, writes about "How Not to End Up as an Anachronism." The article describes the resistance to changes in the way we use computers and computer-related services and software, both by IT professionals and end users. He mentions software-as-a-service (SaaS) - also known as cloudware, computer applications hosted on a central server such as Google Apps and Greg's company's own Coghead application development system - as a major change in the IT world that is facing resistance from industry professionals:

"The recent "software-as-service" phenomenon is a particularly interesting example of disruptive change. [...] Most companies are starting to understand that they would be better off with less information technology on their premises and more of it procured as a service over the Internet. Still, however, many within IT organizations are reluctant to embrace this form of change."

An excellent point. In 1980, I worked for a school district "data center" that had a huge investment - in hardware and human resources - in "big iron," an IBM System 370 mainframe, that handled all of the district's computing needs: report cards, bus schedules, payroll, and so on. When the Apple II and Commodore PET came along, we bought some to use in the vocational classroom in the building. When I wrote a database application for the PET (in BASIC) that maintained the voc-ed class lists, I felt like Galileo suggesting that the earth went around the sun.

In retrospect, I understand that the high priests of the mainframe were motivated in their denial of the abilities of the new microcomputers not by stubbornness, but by self-preservation. If what I suggested was true, that these "toys" could and would replace their "big iron," it meant their livelihood was threatened. Now faced with "software as a service" and "cloudware" (which somewhat ironically moves us back in the other direction, from millions of individual applications located on PCs to web applications hosted by huge server farms), the reaction is no different than it was almost 30 years ago.