I think the biggest mistake people make when looking at Web Applications and SaaS is thinking that's about just moving users over from siloed enterprise applications. This just scratches the surface.
I'm a long time fantasy football player (16 years now.) When we started our league we all used to get up early on Monday morning to get the stats out of the paper and manually calculate our results and phone them in to the commissioner. We were dedicated buyers on fantasy football magazines. Eventually we found some desktop software from an ad in one of the magazines and used that to start managing our league.
When fantasy football came on-line and we were able to put our league on CBS Sportsline's Commission.com it was a revelation. We were able to configure our league exactly like we wanted and get realtime stats and draft and trade our players much more easily than we ever thought possible. We even stopped having our draft at the local pizza joint so we could go to someones house and connect to the internet with the draft attendees from all over the country (though we are now back at Vito's in Sunnyvale since they added wireless.)
Soon every fantasy football league in existence went on-line. I don't think there has been an off-line league anywhere in the country. A web application made our lives so much easier.
But was have been even more amazing is to see the explosion of popularity in these fantasy leagues since the advent of the web. What used to be a highly targeted sport's fan/geek niche has become a much more main stream pastime. No longer is participation limited to 40 year old losers like myself going out and buying the football magazines. In our office, almost everyone has some sort of team.
Good web applications have a way of doing that. They convert not just existing users but broadening the scope of who uses them. eBay took collectibles out of dust shops and fan mags to the masses. Salesforce.com has brought CRM out of the Fortune 500. It will be interesting to see what is next.
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