5 ms·

Not necessarily as overhead operational costs are lowered with the SaaS model and that's not true 'rent'. Licensing fees would be considered 'rent' but obviousl

• ben_jones 9y ago
  Isn't that a case of "get everyone hooked then raise the prices"? How much is pricing currently subsidized by VC and early access promotions (like GCP, AWS, Uber) which will go away over the next ~10 years.
  • pm90 9y ago
    AWS is currently minting money. Amazon and Google don't offer no subsidies, Amazon at least, invests all its profits back into the business, which is def not a subsidy in any sense of the term. As the competition heats up and providers become more efficient, I actually expect prices to go down even further.
• kem 9y ago
  I agree with the "not necessarily" part, but one thing that concerns me is in seeing large, critical institutions, like large hospitals and universities, outsourcing critical infrastructure off-premises. If you look at operational costs per se, and licensing fees in a scenario like that, you're missing a huge proportion of the most threatening costs. Consider hospitals, for example, and recent problems with ransoming electronic health system data. What concerns me with SaaS is that the biggest costs are very catastrophic or serious risks (like lock-in dependencies, or hacking due to monocultures--by the way, is that a formal, modeled concept in computer security, like it is in agriculture? The vulnerability of a market to "infection" due to monocultures?) that are maybe high probability over a very long-term period, but very low over a short-term period, and hidden.