51–57 of 57 posts
A lot are just close to vaporware. It also takes advantage of people more than most business models.
If your business is just adding a system prompt and trying to keep users from figuring out you could just do this with ChatGPT, I can't say I'm a fan. Not a hater... but not a fan.
If you have more functionality with actions, events and context, that's fine.
This distinguishes SaaS from traditional software that was sold as a good. In the good-based model, you purchased a copy of a particular version of the software and could install it and use it independently, on your own machine, no remote servers required for the rest of your life without requiring any "services" from the creator of that that software for the normal every day operation of that software.
As someone else already pointed out, all software (and most hardware) is an abstraction over top of something more primitive.
But to say that all SaaS is a "wrapper" around another service seems to be making the case that SaaS as such cannot provide original functionality that is not exposed by some preexisting lower-level service and that's not true. I currently work for a SaaS company and while we do provide integration with 3rd party services, our core functionality is entirely developed in-house. Our databases which store customer data are analogous to what storage devices on our customers' own devices would be doing if it were good-based software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't software itself an abstraction layer to communicate with the underlying physical components? In theory, it's possible to build a machine that solves a problem without any software at all. Isn't this what an automaton represents—hardware directly engineered to perform specific tasks without the need for software?
> Isn't hardware itself an abstraction layer to communicate with the underlying physical components? Sure, but you're really straining the word "abstraction" here. By this definition all metaphysical concepts are just abstractions around material reality. Which is fine, albeit not that useful a definition of abstraction.
1. What hate? 2. Saying all SaaS are wrappers is a wrong assumption. A service company provides a service of sorts via the medium of software. Take a CRM, it's a system to aggregate contacts, leads, deals etc. and their interaction in some sales pipeline. There might be 3rd party services integrated but the service itself is not a wrapper. You could be cheeky and say you are wrapping a SQL database but then every sof…
Oh the Facebook thing. We had an ads account manager who really did take us to dinner. Would call, ask if we needed anything etc. It was great. One day she ghosted us. I mean that, she ceased all communicated overnight. And in a month or something, the whole thing collapsed on everyone in the field. That was fun.
Most SaaS is a UI in front of a SQL database with a few services built around it. Sometimes these services are quite minimal. Sometimes it really is just a UI for a database with not much else. The fact that it earns so much shows that the thing people pay for, for the most part, is usability and convenience... as if Apple being the most valuable company in the world for a while didn't already illustrate that.
I agree, but I would actually say that this is a good thing. If a SaaS can effectively map a real-world problem or pain point and solve it in a simple way, the goal has been achieved. Sometimes, there’s no need to overengineer a product when it can leverage existing technologies in a smart way.
I'm not saying the people taking things the last mile to the customer and making a good UI/UX should not make money, just that the people who built the stuff they're building on should also make money.
Software has turned into an industry where that largely is not the case.