Let's start by stating the obvious: consumer software is where it's at, and software nowadays means cloud apps. Now get back to your cubicle and resume working with that enterprise software from the 90's. Or more precisely, let's see you try and perform knowledge work around that software which does its darnest to stop information from being shared to your colleagues who would need it, where they need it, when they need it.

Don't look so sad, you can drop into Facebook every 15 minutes to relieve the pain.

Both consumer apps and the cloud are true disruptions to the software industry, as they appear to turn the former economies of scale into diseconomies of scale.

These economies are shaking up the field for both the vendors and customers at the same time. When agility is the asset to have, small is beautiful indeed. Start-up vendors can offer solutions that compete on the global markets from day one. Customer start-ups will have the chance to assemble a toolkit for their internal collaboration and external communication by choosing from quite simply the best-of-breed applications out there for a cost that may be almost negligible.

Could the silver lining for enterprise software makers in all this doom & gloom be that they are in fact given a chance to redeem themselves from the sins accumulated over the past few decades? If you've already alienated the users and are about to lose the support from management and decision makers that once paid your maintenance fees, isn't this the perfect moment to re-engineer your offering to be the way you've really wanted to architect it for the past 10 years already? To build something new, you must let go of something old.

If the software maker buys itself a data center or two and starts hosting the bits that it previously used to deliver to customers on DVD's, does that make the business cloud enabled? No, not until you start to truly design your applications for the cloud. Forget the three year release cycles and big bang system migrations, that just won't cut it anymore.

Being in the cloud is not enough. You need to also let go of the weight that's keeping you stuck on the ground and make your software float in the air, light as a feather, in your cloud or mine. The clouds are not a mere deployment model to cut server maintenance costs, they are the platform needed for powering the loosely coupled businesses of today and tomorrow.