youngMC

There are probably lots of ways to slim down new market and technology advancements - "a railroad is just another way to get from A to B!" or a "telephone is just another way to talk to your mom!" However, both inventions had the effect of opening up transportation and communications to new people and new niches. In the cases of SAAS and Social Media: SAAS is meant to make the capital costs of running and supporting software (for the end customer and client) much cheaper, thereby opening up the possibility for many more users to use it than before. Your average employee at a large enterprise isn't going to be very capable of learning a new desktop software like Word (think about how early children are started now on Word/Excel, given the complexity of those packages!) but they may stand a chance at accessing software that's presented simply with no complex installation required. The delivery model for Salesforce is so much more efficient than some complex installation that it affords a larger client base actually able to see and spend time with it. I'd argue that more people in the enterprise are aware of the company's sales pipeline, forecast, and client base as a result - opening up the number of seats to be sold, creating a more sticky product, and so on. Social Media opens up another previously untapped avenue of attention. Before Twitter, Facebook and the like, advertising didn't really have much of a chance of being there at the point of connection and 1-on-1 or 1-on-many personal interaction. With new supply of attention available for corporate sponsorship, it's easy to then presume a global increase in ad spend might follow, instead of a simple reshuffling. There's a lot of writing out there about the "attention economy" which is really something that ties under both of these trends. An interesting example under this model is Google's investment in self driving cars. Google is really a media and advertising company, not a car company. What they've done that's so smart is make an investment in one of the few remaining pockets of untapped attention in America - your morning and evening commute. It's Google's secret vision that in the future you'll spend that time doing email and surfing the web on Google properties. All of these are examples of investment areas in an information and knowledge worker type economy, versus the commodities and materials markets like railroads or automobile manufacturing you mention.