Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

Post by _jal » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #43

JakeWesorick wrote: post #11

Lots of the SaaS products we use mean we don't have to hire more employees. So I'm not sure if dollars per employee is a meaningful stat.

No, total cost would be a better measure since there is no per-person cost to the SaaS provider. If you have 10,000 employees that's $100M per year in expenses. If you're just renting payroll, purchasing, etc software for that price it'd be far cheaper to roll your own, or pay a few people to work on OSS full time.

Post by armatav » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

jariel wrote: post #89

paxys wrote: post #8

If you are already spending >$200K per employee, spending another $10K to make them even 10% more productive is a bargain.

"spending another $10K to make them even 10% more productive is a bargain." $200K is not a good benchmark for what companies spend. Median salary in the US is about $50K [1] Average overhead per/employee is 18-26% [2] So a $10K spend for 10% increase in productivity on someone earning about $60K ... is not a bargain. But there's a problem with this, because SaaS can be 1) Individual productivity 2) Operational produc…

Post by jonfw » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:44 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #104

76543210 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bigger concerns is that it creates dependency, prices go up, and you either deal with it, or you change systems which is hugely costly. FOSS as much as possible.

FOSS is free if your time is worthless. There's plenty of situations in business where using it is an incredibly good idea. There's even more situations where you're better off just paying for a service.

Post by whatsmyusername » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

somurzakov wrote: post #181

mm89 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this is an effect of learning to program in the 2010s, but paying for a programming language (Java, PHP) sounds crazy to me. Do people actually do this?

Visual Studio Enterprise is expensive as hell and C# is the king of the enterprise, together with Java which runs on enterprise Oracle App servers

Post by bosma » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

dclusin wrote: post #119

genghisjahn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where’s the list of awesome companies that succeed without managers?

Hard to find for sure. There was a time though when we didn't pay CEO's & professional managers 500x as much as the lowest paid employee. When we did that we still managed to go to the moon, split the atom, develop computers, create antibiotics, and lots of other neat things.