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The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#21

Post by Foobar8568 »

nicman23 wrote: post #14
lordofmoria wrote: post #6

I completely agree that people are vastly undervaluing convenience, reliability and SaaS being essentially a great way to make something “someone else’s problem”. The count argument would be that building with AI will potentially give you infinite customizability, which is especially attractive if you’ve ever hit a brick wall using a line-of-business SaaS product. It works great until you hit that wall. But again, I…

also the counter argument is that median saas company is outsourcing to AI anyway, that being artificial intelligence or actual Indians

What is not outsourced to India or nowadays, Portugal for Europeans/Switzerland?

Working in Switzerland and first Paris, it's always amusing to see the circle of outsourcing and the overall regression of skills and critical thinking in enterprise.

Or the myth that startups have some of the greatest people we working for them, meanwhile, I was a click away to be able to take over the whole Saas platform of an industrial leader, with a few 100b at stake. And their security response team was inexistant.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#22

Post by rglullis »

clack1987 wrote: post #20
isawczuk wrote: post #19

I would disagree, but before let me acknowledge how well written article is and bread analogy is spot on. However, author complete discounted open source and ability to spin up open source software that will replicate almost 1:1 what SaaS offers without a pay-to-access requirement. Why spend thousands on integration with SaaS that you can take open source, vibe code missing features and start using? You say maintenan…

No. You should know that most software are developed for business. Free or too cheap is not good for business use. When I earn money or save money by a software, i can pay it to get full support.

Do you pay for support for all the FOSS you use?

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#23

Post by notarobot123 »

The risk for SaaS isn't that customers will build their own but that the barrier to entry for competitors is lower.

The Chorleywood process created mega bakeries that displaced regular bakeries because they changed the economics. AI is doing the same and fundamentally changing the economics of production. What used to take years and huge teams to build can be built by much smaller teams much faster.

SaaS isn't going to sublimate straight into consumer built tools but the boiling point for competition has gotten a lot lower.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#25

Post by margalabargala »

nitwit005 wrote: post #7

This went straight from medieval guilds to the 1920s, but actual bread mass production started in the Victorian era, and people did have a big negative reaction to that. They adulterated bread in ways that poisoned consumers during that period, which was a tad unpopular. That drove consumers to some curious brands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerated_Bread_Company

Specifically, copper sulfate was added to flour to slow the rate of fermentation. Highly toxic.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#26

Post by theturtletalks »

All these arguments ignore that the bread you buy today is not always the bread you’ll get years from now.

Don’t we all know the cycle by now?

1. Company pours money and resources to create good product

2. Good product gets customers and those customers use word of mouth to get product viral and even more customers

3. Eventually the company has to make a profit and in that pursuit, they make the product worse by adding ads, adding paywalls, forcing login or subscription service, dark patterns

I’ve seen it happen with so many products I used that I only use open-source now. And if the feature is small, I just build it myself. In your bread example, open-source is the ultimate cookbook and chefs who understand that cookbook can out cook the best chefs out there.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#27

Post by skybrian »

My guess is that SaaS will be around, but it's going to look really different.

Say there's a company that sells you a subscription to an issue tracker. At first, it looks just like any other web-based issue tracker. But, although you won't realize it at first, it's hosted on a Linux VM with a development environment on it. Each customer's app gets built from source.

Then, when you want something changed, you send a message to support. And they just bounce it to a coding agent that edits the source code and rebuilds it.

The sort of customization that enterprises used to pay big bucks for is going to get dramatically cheaper.

(There are technical issues making this safe, but I think they'll be solved.)

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#28

Post by davidpapermill »

notarobot123 wrote: post #23

The risk for SaaS isn't that customers will build their own but that the barrier to entry for competitors is lower. The Chorleywood process created mega bakeries that displaced regular bakeries because they changed the economics. AI is doing the same and fundamentally changing the economics of production. What used to take years and huge teams to build can be built by much smaller teams much faster. SaaS isn't going…

I don’t agree. I think businesses including SaaS are not primarily their tech, but are mostly composed of other functions: sales, marketing, customer success, product management, strategy etc. The value is actually more in these other components than in the code.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#29

Post by sausagefeet »

skybrian wrote: post #27

My guess is that SaaS will be around, but it's going to look really different. Say there's a company that sells you a subscription to an issue tracker. At first, it looks just like any other web-based issue tracker. But, although you won't realize it at first, it's hosted on a Linux VM with a development environment on it. Each customer's app gets built from source. Then, when you want something changed, you send a m…

Maybe I'm a luddite, but this seems far fetched, to me. I just don't see a path for LLMs to make all kinds of changes to a codebase from non-technical people, correctly. Yes, LLMs can do amazing things, but they still don't have a mental model of what a thing is doing and make all sorts of weird decisions that are not what you want.

I believe LLMs are going to make the bar for a SaaS you would pay for, as a company, higher.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#30

Post by wwweston »

theturtletalks wrote: post #26

All these arguments ignore that the bread you buy today is not always the bread you’ll get years from now. Don’t we all know the cycle by now? 1. Company pours money and resources to create good product 2. Good product gets customers and those customers use word of mouth to get product viral and even more customers 3. Eventually the company has to make a profit and in that pursuit, they make the product worse by addi…

I might imagine that even this cycle could change, if the resources necessary to support step 1 and step 2 are much lower. Which might mean step 3 isn’t as necessity driven.

Of course, it’s possible other things can drive step 3.

And frontier models are already a study in unusual levels of resources dedicated to step 1.

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