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Not sure I understand you. From your post, it sounds like you have beef with people who complain about SaaS costs, when many SaaS products are arguably cheap,

by Rury 7y ago

Not sure I understand you. From your post, it sounds like you have beef with people who complain about SaaS costs, when many SaaS products are arguably cheap, cover valuable functions like DBAs used to, and allows many companies to get off the ground in the first place? All while proponents of SaaS are fundamentally no different than companies like SAP or Hedge funds that are making billions via rent-seeking off open source software? Yeah well, I think that's the same reason people complain about SaaS costs. I know some SaaS software my company uses that wouldn't cost us anywhere near what we pay for it, if we opted to build our own via open source tools and maintained it ourselves in house... SaaS is effectively the same as outsourcing - you're paying a third-party service provider for software/IT functions. Companies complaining that SaaS is cutting into their profit margins, are no different than ones complaining that their IT department is cutting into their profit margins. The matter is really about which is cheaper (to make in house vs buy). In some cases it's cheaper to outsource and in other cases it's not.

pm90 7y ago
> Companies complaining that SaaS is cutting into their profit margins, are no different than ones complaining that their IT department is cutting into their profit margins. You’re betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of how software deployments work for most businesses. Theoretically, the choice is between an expensive SaaS product and its equivalent OSS product which would need to be deployed in house. What this scenario misses is that most businesses have really ineffective IT departments which absolutely do not have the ability to: - deploy the OSS versions - guarantee an SLO for the deployment - provide tooling around the OSS deployment Remember that here I’m talking about most businesses; specifically those outside the SV bubble. So SaaS is fundamentally different from outsourcing. The promise of outsourcing is heavily skewed towards reducing costs and SLOs hardly figure into consideration. SaaS tools might be expensive but they guarantee some things. Predictability is hard to get in the software industry; SaaS businesses promise that. Their success reveals a deep desire in the market for predictability around software products. Unless you have a highly qualified SRE team I doubt you can promise the SLOs promised by SaaS vendors.
- RileyJames 7y ago
  Totally agree regarding IT effectiveness. Outside of the tech sector, many businesses choose a saas product because they want IT to have nothing to do with it. Outsourced IT can be difficult to work with (under statement), nearly as if they’re not on the same team...
peteforde 7y ago
It's like this: SaaS companies generally add extraordinary value to the software that they commercialize, both for the customer and for the software itself. You are simply mistaken regarding the cost difference between SaaS cost and having to hire an expert in an open source package (I'm simplifying for the conversation). It's not just a question of instance sizing and data transfer, or even how much it costs to pay those humans to provide support. The real cost is in terms of liability and service level. Most corporations quite simply won't take on the risk of using "raw" open source because if something goes wrong, they need someone to blame. The alternative in a real company would be to use the expensive, generic proprietary solution. They are happy to provide an SLA for $$$. Meanwhile, SaaS companies are frequently started by the core developers of open source projects, and the attention and reputation of having a company exist to promote your project tends to create a virtuous cycle of new users, training materials and PRs. It quite literally raises the tide for all boats. I don't have any beef with the specific act of complaining about prices in general. People are indeed free to not appreciate all sorts of things. However, much like the rise of conscious consumerism, good managers and good companies - the sort of people and places you want to work for when given a choice - increasingly understand that you have to reinvest back into the infrastructure that makes our lifestyle possible. So yeah, go ahead and install all of the locally hosted solutions you want, and feel as superior as you can, until the moment where you realize that it's utterly irresponsible for key tech talent to spend time in a growth stage startup applying patches to things in the middle of the night. If you don't figure it out, your board of directors will replace you with someone wiser.

by Rury 7y ago

pm90 7y ago

> Companies complaining that SaaS is cutting into their profit margins, are no different than ones complaining that their IT department is cutting into their profit margins. You’re betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of how software deployments work for most businesses. Theoretically, the choice is between an expensive SaaS product and its equivalent OSS product which would need to be deployed in house. What this scenario misses is that most businesses have really ineffective IT departments which absolutely do not have the ability to: - deploy the OSS versions - guarantee an SLO for the deployment - provide tooling around the OSS deployment Remember that here I’m talking about most businesses; specifically those outside the SV bubble. So SaaS is fundamentally different from outsourcing. The promise of outsourcing is heavily skewed towards reducing costs and SLOs hardly figure into consideration. SaaS tools might be expensive but they guarantee some things. Predictability is hard to get in the software industry; SaaS businesses promise that. Their success reveals a deep desire in the market for predictability around software products. Unless you have a highly qualified SRE team I doubt you can promise the SLOs promised by SaaS vendors.

RileyJames 7y ago
Totally agree regarding IT effectiveness. Outside of the tech sector, many businesses choose a saas product because they want IT to have nothing to do with it. Outsourced IT can be difficult to work with (under statement), nearly as if they’re not on the same team...

peteforde 7y ago

It's like this: SaaS companies generally add extraordinary value to the software that they commercialize, both for the customer and for the software itself. You are simply mistaken regarding the cost difference between SaaS cost and having to hire an expert in an open source package (I'm simplifying for the conversation). It's not just a question of instance sizing and data transfer, or even how much it costs to pay those humans to provide support. The real cost is in terms of liability and service level. Most corporations quite simply won't take on the risk of using "raw" open source because if something goes wrong, they need someone to blame. The alternative in a real company would be to use the expensive, generic proprietary solution. They are happy to provide an SLA for $$$. Meanwhile, SaaS companies are frequently started by the core developers of open source projects, and the attention and reputation of having a company exist to promote your project tends to create a virtuous cycle of new users, training materials and PRs. It quite literally raises the tide for all boats. I don't have any beef with the specific act of complaining about prices in general. People are indeed free to not appreciate all sorts of things. However, much like the rise of conscious consumerism, good managers and good companies - the sort of people and places you want to work for when given a choice - increasingly understand that you have to reinvest back into the infrastructure that makes our lifestyle possible. So yeah, go ahead and install all of the locally hosted solutions you want, and feel as superior as you can, until the moment where you realize that it's utterly irresponsible for key tech talent to spend time in a growth stage startup applying patches to things in the middle of the night. If you don't figure it out, your board of directors will replace you with someone wiser.