6 ms·

I remember the days before SaaS. Sure we paid only once and self hosted services with open source, but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 pe

by ajb 2y ago

I remember the days before SaaS. Sure we paid only once and self hosted services with open source, but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.

dijit 2y ago
Out of interest, who's managing your mail, accounts, purchasing and computer setup now?
- cadamsau 2y ago
  What I’ve observed is it becomes part of the job of the office admin person. So not zero headcount maybe 0.1 or 0.2 but that’s pretty good if the SaaS bill is another 0.2 headcount.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- scarface_74 2y ago
  You pay $25 a seat to either Google (GSuite) or Microsoft. There is nothing to manage but signing into the account. As far as computer purchasing, my latest employer had my computer shipped directly from Apple. Once I got it, I installed the mandated MDM software.
  - zie 2y ago
    You clearly have never dealt with their support system(s). You still need a geek or geek adjacent person. Their stuff breaks all the time in weird and wonderful ways and someone local has to figure that out and send trouble tickets in to the vendor(s). With Google, you pretty much can't get support, even if you are a paying customer, so you absolutely have to have your own human, if only to tell you: You can't use Google that way... With MS you can get support, but you pay extra for it, and it's hit and miss as to how useful it is. With Apple, you get support. It's generally pretty good, but can occasionally fail.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      What do you think can “break” with logging in to your Google account and using GSuite? It’s basically the same thing as the consumer version. It’s the same with O365.
      - frizlab 2y ago
        There are many ways in which a cloud suite can fail. I was the guy zie is talking about for many years though it was not my main job.
        aembleton 2y ago
        Can you name any of these ways in which a cloud suite can fail?
        pas 2y ago
        payment doesn't go through, for example. because the CEO/founder's card has a limit. we had this ~10 years ago where I was also the aforementioned IT guy for on-offboarding, doing whatever needs to be done for marketing, to set one more TXT record, to add one more email alias, to host one more PDF file, and so on. because this is typical when you are at the size that you have a lot of SaaS subscriptions and you need to manage them, but still way too small to have institutional muscle memory (with semi-dedicated long-hauler folks, proper enterprise accounts with good separation of concerns/controls).
        scarface_74 2y ago
        That’s not a technical problem or one unique to SaaS. Someone has to be responsible for onboarding and off boarding and making sure suppliers and vendors are paid. A lot of the HR stuff ironically can also be handled by a PEO for small businesses. https://www.rippling.com/aso https://www.rippling.com/aso While your employer as far as hiring, firing, internal management is your actual company. As far as health benefits and payroll taxes you are “co employed” by the PEO
- ajb 2y ago
  Well, at my previous company it was split between a few Devs. Annoying, but didn't take anything like a whole full-timer.
  - dijit 2y ago
    This is why it should be the c-suite making the final call, it might not seem like a lot of work but an hour of your time is in the region of $100-$150, but a full time IT person can be hired for €60/hr. At some point your 0.2 becomes 0.3 and eventually crosses a threshold where it just makes sense to dedicate a resource for cost reasons.
scarface_74 2y ago
“We” did no such thing. Major enterprises have been in bed with Microsoft since the late 90s. Before that, they were running DOS on the client and Novell Netware on a server. Linux and “open source” has never been big in business.
- mbreese 2y ago
  Weren't enterprises already on yearly contracts with licenses and support included? I know developer tools from Microsoft in the 90's had subscriptions, but I never dealt with Enterprise licensing back then. But, given some of the blanket enterprise licenses I did have to deal with, I always thought at that level it was always a subscription model. I think the shift wasn't that the SaaS model is now new, but that the SaaS model was now also taking over consumer and small business accounts.
  - StellarScience 2y ago
    We used to buy Microsoft MSDN subscriptions, which got us constant upgrades of Visual Studio and other development tools. Those licenses were perpetual - you'd get a disk with e.g. Visual Studio 2007 on it, and you were legally entitled to use that version forever. IIRC if we didn't think we'd need a new version anytime soon, to reduce costs sometimes we wouldn't purchase MSDN renewals. I think Microsoft's licensing 20 years ago shows the prevailing view then was that companies wanted the certainty of perpetual licenses.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      20 years ago, most businesses and consumers didn’t have reliable and fast internet. MSDN came in dozens of CDs/DVDs in a binder. Back then, most people only had one computer and if you switched between Windows and Macs you had to buy a separate copy of Office. Now I can run Office on my Mac, iPad (and pair it with the same mouse and keyboard I use with my laptop), and iPhone. If I’m not near my computer but want to use Office on another computer, I can do it on the web. There is also a lot more churn in the mobile space as far operating system and hardware upgrades that mean needing to update your apps. Despite bad blood between the two back in the day. Microsoft has been keeping up with the latest Apple hardware/OS initiatives since 1980.
graemep 2y ago
> but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper. That sounds excessive even then. Its probably even more excessive now - some things are probably easier to manage on a small scale ~ there are a lot of tools for deploying and managing stuff.
- ajb 2y ago
  The guy might have been a bit under loaded, at least after the initial burst, but given that SaaS wasn't available at the time I don't think there was a good alternative. Getting someone in part time would have been a false economy the first time something screwed up and they weren't in. If it was a pure software startup we could have done without, but it was a semiconductor company.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by ajb 2y ago

dijit 2y ago

Out of interest, who's managing your mail, accounts, purchasing and computer setup now?

cadamsau 2y ago
What I’ve observed is it becomes part of the job of the office admin person. So not zero headcount maybe 0.1 or 0.2 but that’s pretty good if the SaaS bill is another 0.2 headcount.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
scarface_74 2y ago
You pay $25 a seat to either Google (GSuite) or Microsoft. There is nothing to manage but signing into the account. As far as computer purchasing, my latest employer had my computer shipped directly from Apple. Once I got it, I installed the mandated MDM software.
- zie 2y ago
  You clearly have never dealt with their support system(s). You still need a geek or geek adjacent person. Their stuff breaks all the time in weird and wonderful ways and someone local has to figure that out and send trouble tickets in to the vendor(s). With Google, you pretty much can't get support, even if you are a paying customer, so you absolutely have to have your own human, if only to tell you: You can't use Google that way... With MS you can get support, but you pay extra for it, and it's hit and miss as to how useful it is. With Apple, you get support. It's generally pretty good, but can occasionally fail.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    What do you think can “break” with logging in to your Google account and using GSuite? It’s basically the same thing as the consumer version. It’s the same with O365.
    - frizlab 2y ago
      There are many ways in which a cloud suite can fail. I was the guy zie is talking about for many years though it was not my main job.
      - aembleton 2y ago
        Can you name any of these ways in which a cloud suite can fail?
        pas 2y ago
        payment doesn't go through, for example. because the CEO/founder's card has a limit. we had this ~10 years ago where I was also the aforementioned IT guy for on-offboarding, doing whatever needs to be done for marketing, to set one more TXT record, to add one more email alias, to host one more PDF file, and so on. because this is typical when you are at the size that you have a lot of SaaS subscriptions and you need to manage them, but still way too small to have institutional muscle memory (with semi-dedicated long-hauler folks, proper enterprise accounts with good separation of concerns/controls).
        scarface_74 2y ago
        That’s not a technical problem or one unique to SaaS. Someone has to be responsible for onboarding and off boarding and making sure suppliers and vendors are paid. A lot of the HR stuff ironically can also be handled by a PEO for small businesses. https://www.rippling.com/aso https://www.rippling.com/aso While your employer as far as hiring, firing, internal management is your actual company. As far as health benefits and payroll taxes you are “co employed” by the PEO
ajb 2y ago
Well, at my previous company it was split between a few Devs. Annoying, but didn't take anything like a whole full-timer.
- dijit 2y ago
  This is why it should be the c-suite making the final call, it might not seem like a lot of work but an hour of your time is in the region of $100-$150, but a full time IT person can be hired for €60/hr. At some point your 0.2 becomes 0.3 and eventually crosses a threshold where it just makes sense to dedicate a resource for cost reasons.

scarface_74 2y ago

“We” did no such thing. Major enterprises have been in bed with Microsoft since the late 90s. Before that, they were running DOS on the client and Novell Netware on a server. Linux and “open source” has never been big in business.

mbreese 2y ago
Weren't enterprises already on yearly contracts with licenses and support included? I know developer tools from Microsoft in the 90's had subscriptions, but I never dealt with Enterprise licensing back then. But, given some of the blanket enterprise licenses I did have to deal with, I always thought at that level it was always a subscription model. I think the shift wasn't that the SaaS model is now new, but that the SaaS model was now also taking over consumer and small business accounts.
- StellarScience 2y ago
  We used to buy Microsoft MSDN subscriptions, which got us constant upgrades of Visual Studio and other development tools. Those licenses were perpetual - you'd get a disk with e.g. Visual Studio 2007 on it, and you were legally entitled to use that version forever. IIRC if we didn't think we'd need a new version anytime soon, to reduce costs sometimes we wouldn't purchase MSDN renewals. I think Microsoft's licensing 20 years ago shows the prevailing view then was that companies wanted the certainty of perpetual licenses.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    20 years ago, most businesses and consumers didn’t have reliable and fast internet. MSDN came in dozens of CDs/DVDs in a binder. Back then, most people only had one computer and if you switched between Windows and Macs you had to buy a separate copy of Office. Now I can run Office on my Mac, iPad (and pair it with the same mouse and keyboard I use with my laptop), and iPhone. If I’m not near my computer but want to use Office on another computer, I can do it on the web. There is also a lot more churn in the mobile space as far operating system and hardware upgrades that mean needing to update your apps. Despite bad blood between the two back in the day. Microsoft has been keeping up with the latest Apple hardware/OS initiatives since 1980.

graemep 2y ago

> but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper. That sounds excessive even then. Its probably even more excessive now - some things are probably easier to manage on a small scale ~ there are a lot of tools for deploying and managing stuff.

ajb 2y ago
The guy might have been a bit under loaded, at least after the initial burst, but given that SaaS wasn't available at the time I don't think there was a good alternative. Getting someone in part time would have been a false economy the first time something screwed up and they weren't in. If it was a pure software startup we could have done without, but it was a semiconductor company.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]