ReadWriteWeb

By Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder of PubMatic

There has been a lot of coverage about the potential Yahoo! acquisition by Microsoft over the last week. This coverage has looked at issues such as deal mechanics, antitrust implications, and the impact on advertisers. One aspect of the possible blockbuster deal that has not been adequately examined is the impact on web publishers, in particular the medium and long tail publishers who are almost wholly reliant on ad networks to monetize their ad inventory.

We all know the term 'Software as a Service (SaaS). The term SaaS was coined in a conference in 2005 and then popularized by Salesforce with its "No Software" motto. Today Google is one of the strongest backers of this approach, with such products as Gmail, Google Reader and Google Docs. And ever since Bill Gates' famous Internet services memo in November 2005, Microsoft has been promoting the concept too.

But today we can coin have a new, similar term: HaaS, for 'Hardware as a Service'. [Update: As several commenters have pointed out, in fact we didn't coin the term HaaS. It seems that Nick Carr was the first, in March 2006.] Hardware has always been available as a service through dedicated hosting providers, but it was never so well abstracted until Amazon introduced S3 and EC2. With dedicated hosting, you still had to deal with dirty hardware issues like scalability; but Amazon makes it a totally painless experience. In other words, the relationship between EC2-S3 and dedicated/virtual hosting is similar to the one between SaaS and ASP (Application Service Providers) - EC2-S3 is an evolved version of dedicated or virtual hosting services.