I have an eight-year-old daughter, and for anyone who has a child in this age range, you probably have heard of or been swept up in the “Webkinz” craze that has seemed to take control of our youngsters’ brains. (By the way, there are no Webkinz stuffed animals left anywhere in any of the toy or gift stores in the 150-mile stretch between the Baltimore/Philadelphia/New York metro areas — I checked….)

Webkinz are a bunch of stuffed animals, such as puppies, koala bears, monkeys, frogs, and hippos. There’s nothing unusual about them from other stuffed toys, except for one value-add characteristic: they each carry a code on their labels, and when the child-owner enters the code into the Webkinz Website, they have access to a virtual world in which they can house, feed and clothe their wee little pals. The kids can also play various online games to earn virtual “cash” to pay for all the expenses of taking care of their half-virtual, half-real world pets. Plus, they can play games with others online in a highly controlled collaborative environment.

It occurred to me if Webkinz was offered even just a couple of years ago, the manufacturer probably would have also shipped CDs with the toys which would have required loading onto your computers. And, inevitably, the software would require more memory or upgraded drivers than is available on the PC you wanted to run the game on, which means more expenses and trips to the computer store.

But, no worries. It’s all delivered as Software as a Service, accessed through the Internet, at a site maintained by the toy manufacturer.

Which also leads me to conclude that my eight-year-old may never really experience the joys of loading software from diskettes or CDs, and going through the wizards and all the installation steps. (Plus additional trips to the computer store for memory upgrades, or time spent downloading new drivers.) It’s becoming all SaaSed, big time. Teenagers don’t seem to be spending much time these days goofing around with software CDs. They’re goofing around with MySpace, YouTube, and who knows what else online.

Our youngsters only know SaaS – and that’s what they will continue to expect as they come of age.

Jeremy Wagstaff, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, looks at yet another pronouncement of “Microsoft is dead” in a recent blog post, and actually says it isn’t Microsoft, it’s software in general that is dead.

However, he cautions, before we start dancing on the grave of software, perhaps we should be demanding better quality from the services we get online. He states that “most web applications are broken, and if we were paying for them, or Microsoft were making them, we’d be howling.” So true. Jeremy points out, for example, that Google Docs’ word processor and spreadsheet programs are very buggy.

Jeremy goes as far as suggesting that we like Web 2.0 because we’ve come to expect less from our software.

“All this takes us to a weird place: We somehow demand less and less from our software, so that we can declare a sort of victory. I love a lot of Web 2.0 apps but I’m not going to kid myself: They do one simple thing well — handle my tasks, say — or they are good at collaboration. They also load more quickly than their offline equivalents. But this is because, overall, they do less. When we want our software to do less quicker, they’re good. Otherwise they’re a pale imitation of more powerful, exciting applications in which we do most of our work.”

In my own work, I switched from a desktop survey data collection and analysis program to an online SaaSy-type service last year, and am generally pleased with the results. But the vendor has, without warning, attempted weekend upgrades, leading to a mess on Monday mornings that has left me in a panic over what may have happened to data and reports I had prepared for clients. And, the customer support staff has turned over several times (most recently from a merger), making it difficult to establish a working relationship with the company.

We’re still enamored by the flexibility and simplicity of the Web 2.0 and SaaS models, and I’ll take them any day over the CD packs and installation headaches of old. But it’s time to start holding vendors’ feet to the fire over the quality of these services being delivered, just as we did in the days of old. Whether the code is inside our machines or out in the cloud, we should expect and demand top quality and high performance. Jeremy Wagstaff says we have a long way to go, still.