Ah, the latest name for it.  I use it – we call M5’s core offering Voice as a Service to rhyme with Software as a Service.  But in some ways this idea has been around forever, and in others we are only now discovering what it really means.

In the seventies, ADP started to eliminate office payroll software with a service model. Not for cost or even time savings, by the way, but because it was too important to do yourself. Business owners that get payroll wrong can go to jail. For decades, they’ve been doing this in more and more places, with more and more software, like trading floors and car dealerships.

TiVo is VCR as a service. iPod + iTunes is music as a service. And it is going to accelerate. Why? The web and its apostles:

1. Google.
2. Microsoft jumping in now with Live Mesh.
3. Salesforce.com.
4. Cisco enthusiastically pushing aside Meeting Place, their conference bridge, and buying Webex for 8x revenue in a deal that closed in 8 days.

In a world where the good and the bad about your business can be broadcast across the global marketplace at the speed of light, you have to be focused. You have to be great at what you do. You have to get everything else, everything you can, as a service. You have to learn how to evaluate services, which is different than products, and is different from outsourcing stuff for cost or time savings.

This movement, this fundamental reinvention of business, will lift us out of economic glum, and save us from our graying workforce and newly minted stampeding Asian capitalist hordes. Lots of businesses intensely innovating on their one thing, will crank out new possibilities for us all. The ordinary can be reinvented as the extraordinary. A service to create lasting mementos from funerals. To organize meetings of common interests. To organize, backup, share your storage of massive amounts of personal media. All M5 clients. Who would have thought that you could use ordinary phones as a strategic business tool? This all comes from the deep focus that this as-a-Service economy forces on us.