A great post at ZDNet on the reasons why on-demand applications are truly different from traditional software. The models are so fundamentally different, it’s virtually genetic, as this quote explains:

The focus of a conventional software sale is getting the customer to buy the software. When conventional software executives talk about customer success, what they have in mind is helping customers install and run their software successfully.

The focus of an on-demand application sale is maximizing usage. When on-demand executives talk about customer success, they really do mean customers’ businesses operating more successfully — which, as I said earlier, is the real reason why businesses buy applications in the first place.

The lesson, really, is to buy the solution that lets you expend the majority of your energy on solving your business problem and not on the details involved in customizing, testing and deploying software.

This is really well written piece (as I’ve come to expect) from the Software as Services blog at ZDNet. I highly recommend a quick read. I’ve also written about this before, here.