Good article and a good debate!
Here are my 2-cents!
I believe ?public buses? and ?private cars/cabs? will co-exist for a long time to come. If we take this analogy to SaaS - I do envision different ?classes? of applications using different approaches - multi-tenancy or single-tenancy. I believe horizontal applications such as e-mail, SMS, chat, web meeting, development tools/utilities and social networking (you can?t network otherwise!) sites using multi-tenancy and more ?private/vertical? applications using single-tenancy. I am talking about $5 to $20 per user per month kind of applications vs $100s of dollars a month per user kind of applications here.
I don?t see any harm or loss of privacy in ?aggregating? data for analytical purposes for ?greater good? as long as specific private information is suppressed and I do see it as a significant benefit from multi-tenancy. @ fscavo ? The telecom companies do gather data such as ?how many calls are made between peak hour traffic in a large city such as SFO or NY and what is the average call duration?. This is nothing to do with your calls being ?intercepted? for its semantic content. Think about health care apps where this kind of aggregation can yield for greater good ? some county getting additional health care benefits due to specific profiling of a county.
- nsiva
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