Sramana writes about how companies like Salesforce.com are reducing the cost of market entry with a ready made platform and an eager user base. Here's what I believe some of the strategic implications are:

Ecosystems versus monolithic products. Value in monolithic products would get deconstructed by several smaller niche players and re-aggregated into an ecosystem. The crucial enabler would be the existence of a common infrastructural stack that enables re-aggregation.

Market place fragmentation and accelerated consolidation cycles due to increased choices and easier entry. More number of companies would cross the early adopter stage but many would falter when faced with the challenges of mainstream adoption. This would force application vendors to add value or face the consequences of low lock in (see point below).

Lock in 2.0 : Increased switching costs for companies leading to lock in of a different type. Microsoft locked in people with the Windows API. Salesforce is trying to do the same thing with their "on demand" platform. But the catch here is that there is no monopoly as far as the applications that rest on the platform are concerned. They can be switched more easily to a competitor on the same platform because of the commonalities in the underlying tech stack.

Value migration within an app space. Since the infrastructural stack is the same, value will migrate from the back end to more customer facing aspects. Companies whose core competence lies in the backend might find this model unattractive.

New opportunities for product oriented services companies like Symphony Services with reduced selling and marketing costs. Get Salesforce.com as a customer and sell into the app base. You have a common platform to master and the expertise can be leveraged across the whole app community. Software delivery management in such companies would also need to evolve in step with the on-demand, perpetual Beta environment.

Systems integration will become "ecosystem gluing". The task of the integrator will be to provide services to build an ecosystem centered around the chosen SaaS platform.

Changes in the software developer marketplace with skills getting realigned to SaaS platforms versus the current orientation to technologies (J2ee, K2ee , L2ee and what not).

My prediction: Ebay will enter this space soon. The are already doing it in the consumer space with their API program. I see strong market and technology relatedness which will make it an attractive diversification.