4 ms·

Relying on third parties is never safe. I think these services are great for fast prototyping, but eventually you should move on to build your own stuff.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
I agree. We need a shift away from the whole SaaS idea. It plays nicely with ultra-short-term market thinking, so people buy into that, but it is bad long-term. Any service you use is giving away control to a third party. It's true in life as well. Some services are easily replaceable - if the barber shop next to you closes down, there's always another few streets away. But some services are not so easily replaceable, and it's the case of most of them on-line due to the very bad state of software-software integration (i.e. having people to write complicated translation layers). If you depend on such services for your business and they decide to shut down, you're screwed. If we want to move computing forward, we need more products and less services. More software that one can download and host themselves.
- michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  For lots of businesses the choice isn't between SAAS and download+install, but SAAS and not having an app at all. It's a real cost+risk to maintain, update, secure, backup and troubleshoot an application internally and in most bottom line terms is less expensive as a SAAS than an internal application.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Yeah, but the end result is a string of services depending on services depending on services, and a very fast-moving ecosystem of fragile, throw-away solutions. Sure, it makes some people some money, and there's a perfectly rational short-term market reasoning to do your product this way, but is this the world we want to live in? I think this is one of those cases where to make real progress, you have to go against the gradient of economic considerations.
- kowdermeister 10y ago
  SaaS is not bad at all, but when it's misused. Current example is ticketing. Two of my clients need a solution to manage ticketing and subscribers. They went with Eventbrite, even tough it's a bit expensive. It saves them tons of time and money. Sometimes it makes little sense to develop such a system for somebody if they have 2 events / year. Often, third parties are much better in quality, than an in-house dev could create. I would only pick a third party service if it has many competitors, so easily disposable. I've been screwed by this before, I built on an API before and the legal team shut down my API key for bullshit reason. 1 year of devtime went down the drain :) Long story short, SaaS is bad for mission critical features, otherwise great helpers on the short / mid run.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    The distinction of core/critical and non-critical aspects of your business is a good one. I'm not saying "don't use SaaS at all" (even though I dislike the world of short-lived, data-siphoning services we've created). But betting the life of your business on a third-party service makes sense only if the expected life of your business is shorter than the expected life of the service you want to use. And I think we could all use more longer-living solutions.
    - Godel_unicode 10y ago
      To quote Joel Spolsky "If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html
- carterehsmith 10y ago
  I guess it depends? Consider, for example, payment processing - super hard to do properly by yourself. Which is why this is only done by large companies with lot of funds, e.g. Paypal, Stripe, etc. The chances of them going titsup are low. If they do, you switch to another one.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    A special case is a special case. Payment processor going "titsup" would be a literal disruption of market; if they'd all close down, I'd be worrying about getting more shotgun ammo to protect my canned food. But besides that thing that's to a living company like a heart to a living body, I think we could do with using less services and more products just fine.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

I agree. We need a shift away from the whole SaaS idea. It plays nicely with ultra-short-term market thinking, so people buy into that, but it is bad long-term. Any service you use is giving away control to a third party. It's true in life as well. Some services are easily replaceable - if the barber shop next to you closes down, there's always another few streets away. But some services are not so easily replaceable, and it's the case of most of them on-line due to the very bad state of software-software integration (i.e. having people to write complicated translation layers). If you depend on such services for your business and they decide to shut down, you're screwed. If we want to move computing forward, we need more products and less services. More software that one can download and host themselves.

michaelbuckbee 10y ago
For lots of businesses the choice isn't between SAAS and download+install, but SAAS and not having an app at all. It's a real cost+risk to maintain, update, secure, backup and troubleshoot an application internally and in most bottom line terms is less expensive as a SAAS than an internal application.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Yeah, but the end result is a string of services depending on services depending on services, and a very fast-moving ecosystem of fragile, throw-away solutions. Sure, it makes some people some money, and there's a perfectly rational short-term market reasoning to do your product this way, but is this the world we want to live in? I think this is one of those cases where to make real progress, you have to go against the gradient of economic considerations.
kowdermeister 10y ago
SaaS is not bad at all, but when it's misused. Current example is ticketing. Two of my clients need a solution to manage ticketing and subscribers. They went with Eventbrite, even tough it's a bit expensive. It saves them tons of time and money. Sometimes it makes little sense to develop such a system for somebody if they have 2 events / year. Often, third parties are much better in quality, than an in-house dev could create. I would only pick a third party service if it has many competitors, so easily disposable. I've been screwed by this before, I built on an API before and the legal team shut down my API key for bullshit reason. 1 year of devtime went down the drain :) Long story short, SaaS is bad for mission critical features, otherwise great helpers on the short / mid run.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  The distinction of core/critical and non-critical aspects of your business is a good one. I'm not saying "don't use SaaS at all" (even though I dislike the world of short-lived, data-siphoning services we've created). But betting the life of your business on a third-party service makes sense only if the expected life of your business is shorter than the expected life of the service you want to use. And I think we could all use more longer-living solutions.
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    To quote Joel Spolsky "If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html
carterehsmith 10y ago
I guess it depends? Consider, for example, payment processing - super hard to do properly by yourself. Which is why this is only done by large companies with lot of funds, e.g. Paypal, Stripe, etc. The chances of them going titsup are low. If they do, you switch to another one.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  A special case is a special case. Payment processor going "titsup" would be a literal disruption of market; if they'd all close down, I'd be worrying about getting more shotgun ammo to protect my canned food. But besides that thing that's to a living company like a heart to a living body, I think we could do with using less services and more products just fine.