WebEx’s new book, "Why Buy the Cow, How the On-Demand Revolution Powers the New Knowledge Economy?" is a great introduction to the SaaS movement as well as Web 2.0. The collection of voices and perspectives reflects the new reality of our planet. If you or someone in your company is looking to understand what all the hype’s about, this is a great place to start.

In these past ten years, not only has WebEx reshaped the way we think about meetings, but likewise the Web has reshaped the way we think about everything, from enterprise software to getting a date. Today, a new generation of software companies has emerged based solely on delivering their intellectual property as a service: from Google to Salesforce.com, businesses and consumers alike can access amazing functionality, built on massive computing power, by simply connecting to it. Which prompts the question that is the title of this book: Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free? Or, if not for free, by paying only for value received, completely free of the headaches and burdens inherent in “cow ownership."
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In today’s computing industry, on-demand software is the disruptive innovation that is rocking the status quo. Just as the revolution from mainframes to minicomputers to personal computers changed the notion of what computing was all about, today we are experiencing a similar revolution in software. Over the years, the workhorses of COBOL and Fortran have given way to more democratic, modular C++ code and Java applets. Yet today this revolution is only gaining momentum, as programming toolkits like Ajax and Ruby on Rails are enabling new composite software applications to draw together bits of functionality from multiple applications into new "mashup" applications.
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