With SAP's Sapphire event just concluded, it seems ludicrous to discuss the possible end of the packaged software industry as we have come to know it. SAP, the king of packaged enterprise applications, is ascendant and building on impressive growth numbers.

But the fate of all complex human systems of organization can change suddenly, as Jared Diamond's book Collapse so masterfully shows and as Nicholas Kristoff wrote in the New York Times over the weekend.

Witness what Kristof had to say about Kaifeng, China, which a thousand years ago was "by far the most important place in the world... its population was more than one million. In contrast, London's population then was about 15,000." Kristoff visited today's Kaifeng and found it a backwater without even an airport of its own, prompting him to observe that "it's striking how fleeting supremacy is, particularly for individual cities."

That's a point Diamond makes at the civilizational level in Collapse, and one that can be made for life itself. New species have appeared suddenly (as in the Cambrian Explosion) and disappeared just as quickly, with scientists believing that half of all species, including the dinosaurs, went extinct in the geological wink of an eye about 200 million years ago.

The same pattern obtains in e-business. During the dotcom era, some startup software companies whose very names have now been forgotten had market capitalizations higher than that of, say, General Motors.

None of this is to suggest that there is something awry with the business plans or innate strengths of today's enterprise applications giants. It is just to observe that, if and when the situation changes, we might see it end with a bang rather than a whimper. Taken in context, it is almost surreal to contrast, say, customer relationship management (CRM) software company Siebel's triumphant attitude in 2002 versus today's reality of CEO flux and major competition from Salesforce.com, among others. In 2002, Siebel claimed CRM revenues ten times higher than SAP's; just a few quarters later, SAP surpassed Siebel.

These examples of the dotcom era and Siebel's operations demonstrate that it is not impossible or even improbable for either the e-business paradigm or the state of individual companies to change at a moment's notice. The next part of this article will look at how previous revolutions in the IT industry have taken place quickly and unpredictably.