I came across an article in the Globe and Mail today about the growing trend for small businesses to hire ’software as a service’ (SaaS) firms to deal with repetitive tasks like customer transactions.

And according to ZDNet, SaaS is going to be a 2.44 billion dollar industry in 2007, with Britain, France the US and Germany being the biggest consumers of these solutions.

Phil Wainewright from ZDNet’s also collected some predictions on what the future holds for SaaS. Even Microsoft’s interested in software as a service.

So what does all of this service-oriented technology really mean? Well, one way of looking at it is that software is a relatively new product — and is thus going through the same degree of service-oriented revamping that other products have already went through.

So at some point, someone realized that to sell a washing machine is one thing, maybe selling the service is just as important (if not more important, than selling the actual product)?

If we’re talking about washing machines and services, we surely must be talking about Maytag — the company that has very successfully marketed not only its products, but also the great service attached to those products.

But wait a minute. Not everyone is so happy with the service they have gotten from Maytag on their washing machine.

So what do washing machines have to do with software as a service?

The point is, they are both service-oriented businesses. And if you’re marketing the service over the software, the quality of the service has to match the quality that’s being marketed.

Software as a service, as stated in the ZDNet article, is mostly something that has been taken up by early adopters in the small- and medium-business arena. Hopefully, when software as a service really sinks in as the best way to manage transactions, the service will match the software.