I watched a gentleman give a ten minute lecture on why SaaS is so wonderful. I agree completely (http://paradigmpop.com/node/33 to see me agree that SaaS rocks). However, I find it very strange that a company would take the full presentation to talk about why accessing something over the internet is much better than installing and maintaining it on local computers. GMail is SaaS, but if one were to talk for ten minutes on GMail, most of the presentation would talk about the cool archiving approach, the gigabytes of storage, the themes. These are the features that best reveal benefits of using GMail. The fact that one would access the tool over the internet is almost a given, and would not merit more than a mention in that ten minute presentation.

Finally I guess it goes down to who you are selling to and what matters most to them, but if I end up selling PoP Project on the fact that it is SaaS, then there would be lot of much cooler other benefits that get stuck waiting behind the curtain.