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There are some conferences that seem to set the direction of the technology industry: Bill Gates’ ‘Information at Your Fingertips’ address to Comdex in 1990 that confirmed an object-oriented future; the IDC conference in Paris in 1995 when Oracle’s Larry Ellison predicted the death of the PC and the birth of the ‘Internet terminal’; Steve Jobs at MacWorld 2001 brandishing the first iPod.

We first started hearing about Office 2.0 from some of the IT industry’s real thought-leaders during the summer months. Their opinion was unanimous: “Get there. In years to come people will boast, ‘I was at the first Office 2.0; that’s when it all really started’.”

There was no single product hogging the limelight in San Francisco in early October at the inaugural event. But it was no less of a watershed.

Several hundred companies – from the colossus of Google to the humblest pre-revenue start-up – collectively exuded the conviction that business software – from word processing to accounting – as well as the platforms and systems infrastructure that underpins it was shifting wholesale to a new paradigm in which applications are delivered as a service over the web.

There have, of course, been some trailblazers. Salesforce.com (which by no coincidence was hosting its Dreamforce annual conference just around the corner from Office 2.0), NetSuite and a handful of others, have proved the viability of the model in areas such as sales automation and HR. But the combination of advances in online delivery technologies (AJAX and web service-enabled ‘mash-ups’ are just two) and the wide acceptance of social networking applications in the consumer arena has spurred incredible momentum for software-as-a-service (SaaS).

As our cover feature this month profiles, the IT industry is readying itself for that profound shift: venture capital is flooding into Office 2.0 start-ups, in search of the Microsoft or SAP of SaaS. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are building monster data centres in the wilds of Oregon, right next to cheap electricity supplies, with a view to delivering desktop applications to tens of millions of users. And, meanwhile, the traditional, packaged software vendors are asking technology economists to run simulations of their future sales to find out just how ugly their revenue curves are going to look when they start to shift users to the subscriptions model.

It is going to be thrilling documenting those events as they unfold. As for Office 2.0 in 2007, think Live Aid 1985.