“… consumers are spending more time online engaged in dozens of new bandwidth-heavy activities…” This is an interesting yet obvious conclusion. Broadband has become a commodity in almost every western country and ‘standard’ in many European countries.
When you put ‘ high bandwidth acitivites’ in relation to SaaS what do you get ? Powerfull backend applications running in a browser is an option. It could very well be powerfull applications, rich content ran by powerfull local applications. This is an aspect of what Microsoft calls software + services. High bandwidth makes the location (local / remote) of information irrelevant as it is transported in seconds. Consumers in this case decide how thay ‘process’ the content …
… Forrester has surveyed European adults about their technology use for nine years. We track a wide variety of online activities relevant to consumers' daily lives, and we dive deeply into media consumption, online shopping, entertainment, and social networking online activities to understand how this changes over time. Now that broadband has reached 72% penetration among Internet users in Europe and is almost ubiquitous in some European countries, consumers are spending more time online engaged in dozens of new bandwidth-heavy activities. This deep dive into European consumers' behavior online will give market research professionals the tools they need to bring facts and insights into their company's marketing and strategic planning discussions. …
Source: European Consumers' Behavior Online: A 2007 Deep Dive
