Interesting perspective. Counterpoint - my line of business is seeing more customers move away from on-prem licenses and instead prefer SaaS cloud hosted solutions.
The reasons being: 1) Quicker turnaround time for customer service requests 2) product knowledge expertise 3) lower internal IT resource demands 4) SaaS usually being cheaper than license in the short term 5) the intrinsic value of owned licenses being lower than what was sold due to product lifecycles, user adoption, security constraints, etc. 6) lower perceived switching costs with SaaS.
I’m genuinely curious, why do you feel SaaS is an inferior product? What makes it the devil’s work?
And FWIW, I realize I’m typing this on a FOSS application. I absolutely see the value in FOSS, it’s why I switched from Reddit 2 years ago, but I’m not kidding myself, the devs here gotta eat too and, just like KBin, they could jump ship any day if they chose to.
SaaS cloud hosted solutions vs on prem solutions? Not necessarily a bad move. You can save money and a lot of overhead and headaches if the software we’re talking about has a lot of different potential hosting providers / licensors so that prices are competitive.
Things like choosing who to host your PostgresDb, sure you could do it on prem, but it will likely be cheaper to pick a cloud host. BUT, that’s only because Postgres is open source, leaving tons of hosting providers to compete, and it is also still very similar to the rest of SQL dbs, leaving for extremely little lock-in, both amongst DBs and amongst hosts.
Salesforce though, and similar cloud platforms, are the opposite of that. Everything you build on them is completely locked into them. The DBs are salesforces’ custom db technology (which sucks), their interfaces are coded in a combination of one of three different Salesforce specific programming languages / frameworks, and it does extremely little out of the box, meaning that as a company when you adopt it, you have to spend a ton of time and money on a salesforce admin / specialist to set everything up for you, likely a bunch of coders to write custom code for you, and at the end of the day, because of its restrictions you’ll still produce a piece of crap interface / application that requires weeks of training for any employee to use.
And after all of that, Salesforce willl still charge you somewhere on the order of 10-1000x as much for simple stuff like /GB of db storage, compared to open source competitive DBs.
When platforms have that much lock-in, then they’re ripe for exploitation, which is why Salesforce is so insanely profitable. I can pretty much guarantee you that every mid size and larger company that uses Salesforce would have spend far less money overall by hiring a dedicated software development team to build out their own applications and infrastructure using open source (cloud hosted) services.
Saas can compound to higher costs due to the recurring subscription, flexibility comes at a cost, especially when unnecessary features are bundled.
Much like you mentioned of salesforce, there’s a limited control on your data (and your customer’s)
It can’t be airgapped for critical functions
You’re locked in to one vendor in many cases
Cost creep when features are bundled during the enshitification phase (salesforce again)
It reduces consumer/enterprise options since it’s much more profitable so it conducted to the dissappearance of several perpetual license models for scientific software that has now compounded into billions of tax money being buried for use rather than any kind of useful feature addition.
There’s nothing inherently bad or good about SaaS per se as it can make sense, the problem is it became the racehorse the entire industry bet on and *EVERY *SINGLE *FUCKING *PIECE *OF *SW is now fucking SaaS, from printer SW to games on a flipping phone to access to basic scientific sofware. What could have been a great invention to provide scalability and low upfront cost to enterprises spread like cancer and corrupted the entire software industry. For that, Salesforce has been relegated to their own hell circle.
Interesting perspective. Counterpoint - my line of business is seeing more customers move away from on-prem licenses and instead prefer SaaS cloud hosted solutions.
The reasons being: 1) Quicker turnaround time for customer service requests 2) product knowledge expertise 3) lower internal IT resource demands 4) SaaS usually being cheaper than license in the short term 5) the intrinsic value of owned licenses being lower than what was sold due to product lifecycles, user adoption, security constraints, etc. 6) lower perceived switching costs with SaaS.
I’m genuinely curious, why do you feel SaaS is an inferior product? What makes it the devil’s work?
And FWIW, I realize I’m typing this on a FOSS application. I absolutely see the value in FOSS, it’s why I switched from Reddit 2 years ago, but I’m not kidding myself, the devs here gotta eat too and, just like KBin, they could jump ship any day if they chose to.
SaaS cloud hosted solutions vs on prem solutions? Not necessarily a bad move. You can save money and a lot of overhead and headaches if the software we’re talking about has a lot of different potential hosting providers / licensors so that prices are competitive.
Things like choosing who to host your PostgresDb, sure you could do it on prem, but it will likely be cheaper to pick a cloud host. BUT, that’s only because Postgres is open source, leaving tons of hosting providers to compete, and it is also still very similar to the rest of SQL dbs, leaving for extremely little lock-in, both amongst DBs and amongst hosts.
Salesforce though, and similar cloud platforms, are the opposite of that. Everything you build on them is completely locked into them. The DBs are salesforces’ custom db technology (which sucks), their interfaces are coded in a combination of one of three different Salesforce specific programming languages / frameworks, and it does extremely little out of the box, meaning that as a company when you adopt it, you have to spend a ton of time and money on a salesforce admin / specialist to set everything up for you, likely a bunch of coders to write custom code for you, and at the end of the day, because of its restrictions you’ll still produce a piece of crap interface / application that requires weeks of training for any employee to use.
And after all of that, Salesforce willl still charge you somewhere on the order of 10-1000x as much for simple stuff like /GB of db storage, compared to open source competitive DBs.
When platforms have that much lock-in, then they’re ripe for exploitation, which is why Salesforce is so insanely profitable. I can pretty much guarantee you that every mid size and larger company that uses Salesforce would have spend far less money overall by hiring a dedicated software development team to build out their own applications and infrastructure using open source (cloud hosted) services.
Thank you for stepping in.
I’d add
Saas can compound to higher costs due to the recurring subscription, flexibility comes at a cost, especially when unnecessary features are bundled. Much like you mentioned of salesforce, there’s a limited control on your data (and your customer’s) It can’t be airgapped for critical functions You’re locked in to one vendor in many cases Cost creep when features are bundled during the enshitification phase (salesforce again) It reduces consumer/enterprise options since it’s much more profitable so it conducted to the dissappearance of several perpetual license models for scientific software that has now compounded into billions of tax money being buried for use rather than any kind of useful feature addition.
There’s nothing inherently bad or good about SaaS per se as it can make sense, the problem is it became the racehorse the entire industry bet on and *EVERY *SINGLE *FUCKING *PIECE *OF *SW is now fucking SaaS, from printer SW to games on a flipping phone to access to basic scientific sofware. What could have been a great invention to provide scalability and low upfront cost to enterprises spread like cancer and corrupted the entire software industry. For that, Salesforce has been relegated to their own hell circle.