Lawson, CEO Harry Debes was recently interviewed by ZDNet and had some fun things to say about the SaaS industry. Of course, this is Lawson, the ERP provider with no SaaS offering. Some of the highlights were quoted as:

“People will realize the hype about SaaS companies has been overblown within the next two years,” he said. “An industry has to have more than just one poster child to overhaul the system. One day Salesforce.com will not deliver its growth projections, and its stock price will tumble in a big hurry. Then, the rest of the [SaaS] industry will collapse.”

Also, of note:

Won’t people avoid the mistakes of “previous” SaaS incarnations, as you mentioned?

People are stupid. History has shown it repeats itself, and people make the same mistakes.

“Collapse” and “stupid” are pretty big words that could easily boomerang on him, especially in an interview where he basically says that the installed model is great because it traps the customer with high switching costs. Further, the assumption that Salesforce will miss an earnings call, which is then the trigger for a cataclysmic chain reaction, is laughable. Even if some of the biggest SaaS application providers do implode, there are thousands of companies doing well and proving the business case, day after day.

This interview was non sense, inconsistent, contradictory and baseless. I think I can pretty much leave it, at that.