Car usage is personal in nature, far removed from the impersonal nature of business intelligence or CRM done in an enterprise. There is more reason to suppose that enterprises would look at more bang-for-the-buck rather than stick with complicated software licensing programs which doesn’t deliver the goods. Today it is SMEs (small and medium enterprises), but tomorrow it could well be the larger enterprises.

To give enterprise licensing its due, the commoditization and SaaS wave is here for now, but once it has been adopted, companies could well look at the complex and custom licensed-software model to deliver the competitive edge.

As with any evolution, only time will tell.

The big growth in the next few years i see is large enterprises hosting their applications such as SAP. Companies such as accenture with their offshore units can host in the US, project manage in the US and develop and maintain from India. So know hosting enterprise applications is about to become (maybe) cheaper that running SAP inhouse.