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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"

#61

Post by Closi »

layer8 wrote: post #46
Closi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second point just strands parts of customers on outdated versions - remember that time when loads of companies were running Excel 1997 or 2003 to their deaths to save costs? Then anyone on Excel 2013 couldn't use any new features because they weren't backwards-compatible 10 years to some public sector organizations that refused to update. Office 365 is so much better, I can actually send someone a file that uses…

You can’t expect that. A significant number of people are still using Office 2016/2019/2021 (and there is a 2024 upcoming). Personally I don’t plan to switch to Microsoft 365. People in general don’t want their software to change continuously.

I agree that people probably don't want to pay continuously, but i'm not convinced that people in general don't want automatic/ongoing product updates.

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

#62

Post by yard2010 »

arcticfox wrote: post #40
nikolajan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is only partially true. Their business model is based on business use, not personal use. They do allow free community based solutions. Like Notion - use it for free for personal stuff. But better UX and you get to take your notes home.

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

#63

Post by Closi »

financetechbro wrote: post #37
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

I would say it's misleading when it's in a paragraph which is broadly implying that a high gross profit % is a sign of profiteering. See the actual paragraph where the article compares the gross margin of SaaS against the NET margin of Visa/Mastercard.

> Some SaaS companies achieve gross profit margins of 75 to 90 percent, rivaling Windows in its monopolistic heyday. Even the reigning credit-card duopoly of Visa and Mastercard wield a mere 51 percent net margin.

I don't see how anyone can say the above statement or comparison isn't a bit misleading, as the Gross Margin of Visa and Mastercard will be closer to 100% than to 50%.

In reality it's unsurprising that software looks really profitable when you remove all the costs of developing the software.

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

#64

Post by yard2010 »

input_sh wrote: post #21
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.

> (who is a/the creator of Obsidian) No. He is the current CEO, an excellent communicator and definitely the right person for the job, but he wasn't there in the beginning and nothing meaningfully changed about Obsidian's philosophy since for it to be attributed solely to him. I don't disagree with him on anything in particular, it just feels bad to see the two equated. Original devs wanted to spend their time on act…

Sounds utopian and inspiring. I hope it never gets enshitified.

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

#65

Post by yard2010 »

dimitar wrote: post #12

There is a subscribe (in exchange for monthly payments) button under the article, an unaddressed irony. Or perhaps news outlets need money and software shops don't?

Is this an irony? Paying a subscription fee to a magazine, for people to actually write such sharp and to the point articles (no shameless "the industry is broken! Enter my my startup. It will solve it, buy it now" articles) is really different for paying a subscription for maintenance mode 2010 software.

The margin in the former case is much lower since people need to perpetually invest time to create good content. Which is the whole point of this article - this isn't correct for the latter.

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

#66

Post by seanhunter »

troyvit wrote: post #48
banga wrote: post #33

There's some irony to an article about wedging into our monthly bank statements hosted by a site that asks the same...

Yeah because content and services are the same thing.

If you think it’s meaningfully different to ask for a subscription for content than for a service it would add a lot if you could share why rather than just a sneering hot take. It’s certainly not obvious to me that one is good and the other is not.

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

#67

Post by troyvit »

seanhunter wrote: post #66
troyvit wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah because content and services are the same thing.

If you think it’s meaningfully different to ask for a subscription for content than for a service it would add a lot if you could share why rather than just a sneering hot take. It’s certainly not obvious to me that one is good and the other is not.

Sorry about that, you're right that it was kinda low. This is from a previous comment. It's still not the nicest way to put it, but it gets the point across.

- Does reading The Baffler trap you in its ecosystem? If you cancel The Baffler do you lose functionality?

- If The Baffler closes up shop because it was bought by a larger newsletter does it brick any of your devices?

- I turned uBlock off for this page (it was blocking 6 things) and there are no ads. Can you say the same thing for Netflix or fricking Windows?

- Does The Baffler take what you give it and resell it because its 5,000 word privacy policy which you didn't read but had to agree to says it can?

- Will The Baffler's third rate security practices release your identity and those of your customers to private auctions on the dark web?

This is how the newsletter supports itself. Looks like it's about $5 per article. In a period where everybody expects web content for free, we're paying literally trillions to subscribe to software products. As somebody who works for a content organization I'm now asking myself what aspects of the SaSS model can we take up to get people to pay our writers and editors to continue producing local news? I guess we just need to figure out what content people are keeping in spreadsheets.

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

#68

Post by smcin »

anonzzzies wrote: post #26
smcin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be due to the GDPR then.

Doubt it but people seem to misinterpret gdpr rules all the time. Americans are especially paranoid about the letter of the law while here we only use the intention. It’s all only about big offenders not some blog no one reads.

I didn't say "GDPR rules", more like a business decision about how many free articles to allow non-subscribers to view in GDPR vs non-GDPR region.

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

#69

Post by troyvit »

sbarre wrote: post #52
troyvit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? This seems like a great idea for a SaaS product.

Yeah it's called Google Workspace.

Maybe some aspects, but I don't know about the VPN side of it, and my point was directly to the idea of managing shared drives.

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

#70

Post by sbarre »

_xnmw wrote: post #55
sbarre wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet many of them succeed? So unless you think all their subscribers are stupid, they must see a reasonable value exchange. In the large enterprise where I work, I've often argued against building our own in-house XYZ with the position "do we want to be in the business of building and maintaining XYZ or do we want to focus on our core business?" In some cases it definitely makes sense to build something yourself,…

> unless you think all their subscribers are stupid Ah, there’s the capitalist’s circular religious belief, if it’s profitable it must be good, and it’s good because it’s profitable. Except some of the best things in life are not profitable, and some of the most profitable models are not good (such as Facebook/Google’s privacy invasions and the ad-driven model). To think that subscribers pay money because they see a…

> > unless you think all their subscribers are stupid

> Ah, there’s the capitalist’s circular religious belief, if it’s profitable it must be good, and it’s good because it’s profitable.

Not sure how you got to that conclusion from my words, unless you're projecting a metric ton of your own bias into my post.

Sure you can turn this into a big complicated discussion, but I still say that for most companies the decisions is "is it a better choice for our company" and that can absolutely involve spending money but also focus, experience, employee happiness, future flexibility and more.

> To think that subscribers pay money because they see a “reasonable value exchange” is to be completely blind to the incentives behind many big ticket software purchases.

Can you be more condescending? Honest question.

The value exchange is not the only reason but it is the primary reason most companies (and people) spend their money (at least in my experience and observations).

It doesn't actually need to be more complicated than that in a lot of cases.

I don't disagree that what you're saying certainly happens as well, but you make it out like that's always what happens and I don't believe that's the case.

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