Absolutely not. No company wants to run around maintaining and updating software on multiple computers. Right now, even a small company can use an SSO provider and federate all of their SaaS apps with it and it automatically authorize a new employee.
And how do you propose to write software that works and syncs between Macs, Windows, ios and Android devices?
I think there's an opportunity here for small businesses who typically don't have a lot of people managing them.
I run a resturaunt. Resturaunt software (POS, scheduling, table reservations) has many saas solutions, but I've personally seen these problems:
- POS requires cellular for some legal reason, but celluar connection is poor inside a mall
- Power goes out, backup services bring cell networks & fiber back online but not in a uniform manner so service is slow and the Saas times out too quickly to be used
- 2 factor auth won't work because cell systems are degraded
And in all these cases, there wasn't a good reason for the software to be fully online. The usage was by 1 or 2 managers and they all shared the same computer located inside the business.
How are you going to do table reservations and accept payments without being online? Yes I know it’s technically possible to accept credit cards offline. But no one does that anymore.
I think that there's a large market of business (cardinality, not revenue) that run off a single computer today. Meaning the business owner leverages some fractional accounting, ops, fulfillment support, but do the books, payroll, buy things for the business themselves.
Yes, they connect through a browser to cloud software.
I recognize when you're large enough to have operations, accounting, etc. and see the value of SSO, in those contexts.
Well, the history of software development shows that everything is changing and don't lasts forever. Golden age of SaaSes now is going to fade (at least for current version and for some time, maybe a decade). Today junior developers can create a fully working SaaS with dozens of features without even knowing how it works. And they would spend a few weeks or evenings to develop it. We are about to see a flood of services and it will make all the business model obsolete. This is what is happening now at Github. You can see a lot of excellent projects which were written by AI, and no one wants to contribute to these projects, because they can do the same project on themselves
Just because they can write it - which is doubtful - doesn’t mean any company of note is going to trust software written by a random junior developer with any of their proprietary information.
Creating software has always been easier for SaaS type software than understanding the business and sales.
And what do you think happens when a company that is already in that market or an adjacent one gets a whiff of some junior developers product? They just throw a few devs at it and use their existing sales organization and add it as a feature.
Don’t mistake a feature and a product - stolen and paraphrased from what Steve Jobs said about Dropbox. He was right, just premature.
Once no longer charges money, both projects are now open source and free. That might mean the business model didn't work for them. They also run other projects as SaaS (basecamp, hey.com).
No. All I want is to give 0 thought to software. I help to run a marketing agency. Labor is our #1 cost by a huge margin. The monthly costs of software are basically a rounding error. The less we think about it the better.
I think this is the key thought process for purchasers of software/SaaS. For comparison, an average daily meal expense of $30/person for business travel exceeds the pricing of a lot of SaaS offerings. SaaS is so simple and the cost level doesn't require RFPs, lawyers and accountants. It would have to be really compelling and niche to warrant custom install software these days (to OP, many retail POS systems are old school textUI too).
In the pre-SaaS times, a software business would have to somehow guess/calculate the lifetime value of a customer and bake that into the price of the software when it was buy once. Custom software also was often charged in $/seat, required IT people to do updates and that style of software often requires sales people and convincing CxO's to do purchases. SaaS can just be a CC swipe and expense report.
Absolutely not. No company wants to run around maintaining and updating software on multiple computers. Right now, even a small company can use an SSO provider and federate all of their SaaS apps with it and it automatically authorize a new employee.
And how do you propose to write software that works and syncs between Macs, Windows, ios and Android devices?
I think there's an opportunity here for small businesses who typically don't have a lot of people managing them.
I run a resturaunt. Resturaunt software (POS, scheduling, table reservations) has many saas solutions, but I've personally seen these problems:
- POS requires cellular for some legal reason, but celluar connection is poor inside a mall
- Power goes out, backup services bring cell networks & fiber back online but not in a uniform manner so service is slow and the Saas times out too quickly to be used
- 2 factor auth won't work because cell systems are degraded
And in all these cases, there wasn't a good reason for the software to be fully online. The usage was by 1 or 2 managers and they all shared the same computer located inside the business.
How are you going to do table reservations and accept payments without being online? Yes I know it’s technically possible to accept credit cards offline. But no one does that anymore.
I think that there's a large market of business (cardinality, not revenue) that run off a single computer today. Meaning the business owner leverages some fractional accounting, ops, fulfillment support, but do the books, payroll, buy things for the business themselves.
Yes, they connect through a browser to cloud software.
I recognize when you're large enough to have operations, accounting, etc. and see the value of SSO, in those contexts.
Well, the history of software development shows that everything is changing and don't lasts forever. Golden age of SaaSes now is going to fade (at least for current version and for some time, maybe a decade). Today junior developers can create a fully working SaaS with dozens of features without even knowing how it works. And they would spend a few weeks or evenings to develop it. We are about to see a flood of services and it will make all the business model obsolete. This is what is happening now at Github. You can see a lot of excellent projects which were written by AI, and no one wants to contribute to these projects, because they can do the same project on themselves
Just because they can write it - which is doubtful - doesn’t mean any company of note is going to trust software written by a random junior developer with any of their proprietary information.
Creating software has always been easier for SaaS type software than understanding the business and sales.
Thank you. There's a lot of insights y'all are honing. Appreciate that.
Do you think small businesses, e.g. the bodega on the corner, the local barber or nail shop have those concerns?
And what do you think happens when a company that is already in that market or an adjacent one gets a whiff of some junior developers product? They just throw a few devs at it and use their existing sales organization and add it as a feature.
Don’t mistake a feature and a product - stolen and paraphrased from what Steve Jobs said about Dropbox. He was right, just premature.
One time, yes. Local, no. See https://once.com/ for an example.
Once no longer charges money, both projects are now open source and free. That might mean the business model didn't work for them. They also run other projects as SaaS (basecamp, hey.com).
No. All I want is to give 0 thought to software. I help to run a marketing agency. Labor is our #1 cost by a huge margin. The monthly costs of software are basically a rounding error. The less we think about it the better.
I think this is the key thought process for purchasers of software/SaaS. For comparison, an average daily meal expense of $30/person for business travel exceeds the pricing of a lot of SaaS offerings. SaaS is so simple and the cost level doesn't require RFPs, lawyers and accountants. It would have to be really compelling and niche to warrant custom install software these days (to OP, many retail POS systems are old school textUI too).
In the pre-SaaS times, a software business would have to somehow guess/calculate the lifetime value of a customer and bake that into the price of the software when it was buy once. Custom software also was often charged in $/seat, required IT people to do updates and that style of software often requires sales people and convincing CxO's to do purchases. SaaS can just be a CC swipe and expense report.