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Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"

thebaffler.com

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Re: Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"

#31

Post by constantcrying »

I think the article fails to address the appeal of SaaS. The industry isn't massive for no reason and ignoring the lasting popularity makes the subject difficult to understand.

SaaS exists because managing software is hard. The easiest way to get money from a company is to make problems go away. SaaS means your data is stored remotely (you don't have to worry about maintaining your own servers, Databases, synchronization, liability goes to the SaaS company), updates come when they come (your internal support couldn't help, it's someone else's problem anyway), the spread sheets they are replacing were hated anyway and caused constant problems.

Re: Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"

#32

Post by bad_username »

japanuspus wrote: post #4

To me, Obsidian is a perfect example of how to get SaaS-revenue without making the user captive: All data is stored in an accessible form on the user hardware, and what you pay for is sync. X-user kepano (who is a/the creator of Obsidian) has some nice insights on this _file over app_ philosophy.

> what you pay for is sync.

You also have to pay for commercial usage. And may choose to pay for early access to updates.

Re: Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"

#35

Post by briHass »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #28
manmal wrote: post #27

I agree with the author that working on files is preferable, if possible. But SaaS often also solve the hard problem of dissemination, and good luck syncing an excel file with 100 people via Dropbox.

Networked drives have been a thing for ages.

As someone actively pushing a company away from that model to the ubiquitous M365/SharePoint/OneDrive approach, there are so many hidden costs to 'a network share'.

How are you managing VPN access to file servers? How about backups/versioning? Any searching? Access control that can be easily managed by end users? Data governance, RBAC, compliance audits? BYOD/mobile device access?

Re: Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"

#36

Post by Tycho »

After years of dismantling Solarwinds, a ubiquitous network management software, Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake dumped $286 million of shares in December 2020, the day before the company disclosed a staggering malware breach. The “Sunburst” cyberattack exposed data from California hospitals, the Department of the Treasury, the U.S. nuclear weapons agency, and dozens of other agencies and major companies. While the root cause is still under investigation, multiple lawsuits and reports describe a culture of cost-cutting and frequent security lapses. “Typically Thoma Bravo raises prices and cuts quality, but the affected constituency group—corporate IT managers—don’t have a lot of power or agency,” Stoller writes of this precarious stalemate, with potential geopolitical implications. “Their superiors don’t want to think about a high-cost but low-probability event, especially if every other big institution would be hit as well.”

Re: Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"

#37

Post by financetechbro »

Closi wrote: post #14

> The result? Some SaaS companies achieve gross profit margins of 75 to 90 percent, rivaling Windows in its monopolistic heyday. Gross profit is a misleading statistic in the software industry, where almost all of the effort comes from building the thing.

I wouldn’t say it’s misleading, it’s still a very important financial metric. You just have to be aware of its limitations

Re: Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"

#38

Post by nikolajan »

bad_username wrote: post #32
japanuspus wrote: post #4

To me, Obsidian is a perfect example of how to get SaaS-revenue without making the user captive: All data is stored in an accessible form on the user hardware, and what you pay for is sync. X-user kepano (who is a/the creator of Obsidian) has some nice insights on this _file over app_ philosophy.

> what you pay for is sync. You also have to pay for commercial usage. And may choose to pay for early access to updates.

And the sync is locked behind their offering, if you use other software to handle the sync, you're out of luck if you want the data to be available on mobile since you can't dynamically choose the location of the vault.

It's still miles ahead of other offerings when it comes to having the data be "open", but I found this limitation frustrating.

Re: Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"

#39

Post by sevensor »

constantcrying wrote: post #31

I think the article fails to address the appeal of SaaS. The industry isn't massive for no reason and ignoring the lasting popularity makes the subject difficult to understand. SaaS exists because managing software is hard. The easiest way to get money from a company is to make problems go away. SaaS means your data is stored remotely (you don't have to worry about maintaining your own servers, Databases, synchroniza…

This is what I think people don't get about SaaS: they think it's about the first S. The technology. It's not. It's about the second S: the people who keep the technology from collapsing into a black hole of complexity. I've worked at a place with an AWS bill that could have paid for multiple employees. We weren't paying for the software, we were paying for it always to be running. Competent people who are willing to carry pagers are expensive and hard to find. The genius of AWS is that Amazon hires a lot of those people and obscures their existence by putting an API and a bunch of crooked salesmen in front of them.

Re: Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"

#40

Post by arcticfox »

nikolajan wrote: post #38
bad_username wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what you pay for is sync. You also have to pay for commercial usage. And may choose to pay for early access to updates.

And the sync is locked behind their offering, if you use other software to handle the sync, you're out of luck if you want the data to be available on mobile since you can't dynamically choose the location of the vault. It's still miles ahead of other offerings when it comes to having the data be "open", but I found this limitation frustrating.

That’s genius. I’m glad their one primary paid feature can’t be trivially circumvented.
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