Fast Company has an excellent article highlighting why free software tends to fail.

When we think about new products and services, we tend to imagine young folks entering a high-tech store to buy, say, an iPhone. In his blog Tom Peters points out that the biggest and fastest growing market out there is the silver market - the market of active ageing people.

The Mother of All Markets for Approximately Everything for the next quarter-century is the deeply underappreciated, insanely underserved Boomer-Geezer clan of 100 million or so in the U.S. alone.

So, if you're looking for the next big thing, it would't hurt to think about this underserved, uncool market.

An economic crisis tends to accelerate changes that were already undergoing. In ordinary circumstances, these changes take the form of successive adjustments. In crisis, they accelerate and become potentially disruptive.

What are these disruptions in the world of IT?

First, the boundaries of business and technology are getting blurred. As Forester Research indicated, "over the next five years business will become so deeply embodied in technology, and the technology so deeply embedded in the business, that IT will need to be managed quite differently." It even has a name: business technology (or BT for short).

The second change affects the very careers of IT professionals, and is related to the first point. IT no longer exists as a distinct discipline (except for a few highly specialized technical skills). Just look at the IT job postings: there is hardly any that doesn?t require well-rounded industry or functional experience, such as in finance, marketing, banking, or telecom. The "IT guy" as we know it will soon be extinct. And this is not a bad thing. Too often, for too long, IT has been pursued for the sake of technology instead of being soundly tight to business processes and objectives. The pressure generated by the crisis forces IT to clearly add significant value to the processes it is supposed to support (yes, IT is actually a supporting process). It affects not only how we "do" IT, but also how IT professionals communicate the value of IT to stakeholders. Get ready for that. Better: look forward to that!

Third and last, platforms, devices, operating systems, and so on, are becoming no more (and no less) than channels through which IT delivers value to users. Platform is becoming irrelevant to the clients and to the users and that, too, is a good thing. It allows focusing on what really matters: the value IT brings to people and to organizations.

An interesting article from the Wall Street Journal, also commented on Michael Wade's blog Execupundit, clearly points to China as the great winner of this economic crisis.

Ironically, the fact that the Chinese people cannot readily access credit saved them from the worst part of the downturn. For years the world thought that China's finance system was "immature". Now there is another explanation: the Chinese do not believe in credit - and therefore do not rely on credit - to the extent Western economies do.

As a result, it's not a global economic crisis (which implies that the whole world is losing). China emerges victorious. It's not just any economic crisis that will fade away and restore pre-crisis situation. It's a game-changing crisis.

As the Wall Street Journal highlights, the great looser is likely US.

There is more cash sloshing around the world than most people think. The problem for the U.S. and to some extent Europe is that this cash is now in unfamiliar places, some of which -- as John McCain reminded us on the campaign trail -- can be found in countries that "don't like us very much."

The economy downturn doesn't mean that companies will refrain from buying IT products and services. After all, IT is a critical supporting process for each and every organization. However, economy woes will change ? potentially forever ? how companies spend money on IT.

Whether the SaaS model allows organizations to reduce IT costs in the long term remains an open question. I personally doubt it. On the other hand, SaaS offers a number of obvious benefits in the short term. I already mentioned SaaS strengths and weaknesses in another post. Some strengths matter most in times of crisis:

• SaaS renders costs predictable, which is particularly valuable when future is uncertain.
• SaaS delays cash outflows by effectively spreading up-front capital investments over a period of time.
• SaaS moves IT complexity out of the way and considerably reduces IT risks (while security still remains an issue).
• SaaS is scalable, allowing adjusting capacity according to actual demand.

Jeff Kaplan's Think IT services blog has a good post showing further evidence about the crisis strengthening SaaS demand. Joshua Greenbaum also discusses on ZDNet why pure SaaS might not be sustainable but hybrid SaaS will tame customer fears. Moreover, two years ago Gartner already highlighted SaaS disruptive potential.