My friend Jim Fisher pretty much sums it up insofar as traditional enterprise software sales is concerned. I have often said, and written here, that customers have gotten better at buying software than we have at selling them software. It is only after questioning what to replace the broken software-sales system with that buyers fully understand that the current model benefits them and are thus reluctant to accepting change.

Maybe at the end of the day it's less about a new sales model and more about wringing costs out of everything else in order to afford the cost of sales and still deliver a decent margin?

As I survey the landscape of consumer- and business- focused software and service providers I am struck by how much incrementalism there is at the moment. Something like Twitter is ground breaking in terms of breakout adoption, but what about the other 10,000 startups? There are few bold "aha" ideas, lot's of social "-this or -that", and mostly a bunch of companies hoping to draft on the perceived success of a few gorillas. Will we suffer through yet another "Year of the Mobile Web" or "Year of the Semantic Web"?

The above is not a criticism, just an observation. The venture capital will no doubt continue to flow to these companies in the hopes that a few will rise to the top and get acquired. With the melt down in non-VC private equity I am sure that institutional investors will surge back into VC with abandon and this will prop up the Valley for the foreseeable future.

But I'm still left with the uncomfortable question of "What's next?" When Facebook doesn't deliver world peace, and FriendFeed fails to be better than sliced bread, what will we do?


Jeff Nolan is author of Venture Chronicles and VP of Software as a Service (SaaS) for NewsGator These opinions were first presented in his blog.

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