[stiray]

Just an interesting idea, if no one wants to have employees (lets face it, they are a mess, they waste oxygen, they fart, producing CO2, are corona virus friendly, produce road accidents... and you need to pay them so they can live) maybe everyone is having wrong bussiness plan. Whole world should transform to produce only SAAS products for SAAS people as they are the only customers who will in long term still have money to buy SAAS. /s

This is becoming a joke.

In my whole life I didnt buy a one single software product, that is based on subscription model (unless necessary as there are ongoing costs for its development like antiviruses (which I dont use, but this is another story)). Why? As it tells me, the product is at the end of its inovative phase and has nothing more to offer. I am fine with paying for update hunderds of dollars if, and only if, i need the added functionality. Or in different words Microsoft Office 97 was more than enough for 99% of its users (I dare you to install it and find something that you miss, it wasn't perfect but it did get the job done).

But there is more. I wont pay for cloud products either. Why? I believe that what is giving you the "edge" is your knowlidge. Using, for instance, gmail is taking you the chance to increase it. Yeah sure, time to market, but if you stick to DIY logic, this is not going to be a problem (I can set up a mail server with left hand while coding with right hand... and offer it as a SAAS to those that ignore DIY and earn extra bucks ;) /s ). If you ignore the lack of knowlidge, you will end up always paying to someone else or stuck in a problem that wouldn't be a problem if you wouldn't be ignoring it for so long. Not to even go into lack of inovation and reinventing / copying the solutions that were solved long time ago, but this is just another story.

[cercatrova]

I like your first sentence, but unsarcastically. Companies should always strive to do more with fewer employees by automating them away.

As for the rest of your argument, most people are not like you, as they will not want to spend time setting up their own mail server. For companies this is doubly true, as they will likely spend more money setting it up, maintaining it, and upgrading it, than the subscription actually costs.

[scollet]

> Companies should always strive to do more with fewer employees by automating them away.

I wonder if those same companies intend to socialize the wealth generated by their automation.

[cercatrova]

Of course not, there is no incentive to do so. Until there is, nothing will change. I am all for socialization of wealth, as money in circulation boosts the economy more than hoarding it, but I just don't understand how people can say that companies should (morally) socialize their wealth "out of the goodness of their hearts" without some incentive. Companies, like all organizations of individual agents, do not have collective morals. They are merely machinations that have the sole fitness function of increasing wealth, at whatever cost. If we take this to be true, why exactly would, without another fitness function, a company socialize wealth?

[fulldecent2]

I think we've reached peak Hacker News. This is now looking like Slashdot.

[ChainOfFools]

I'd actually prefer slashdot's moderation/meta moderation model to the one used by HN, though it's hard to fault the job dang and co. are doing with their hands-on approach.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Horizontal integration of business processes means a lot of external stakeholders have you by the balls.

[brentis]

This. Bunch of crappy apps which meet the minimum rqt to keep you in the ecosystem. Teams is the business equivalent of imessage. Keeps people on msft products vs. switching platforms. That plus finance folks cant not have their Excel for their 30-tab whatevers.

[TeMPOraL]

You've attached a sarcasm tag to your first paragraph, but I do think the market is actually going there. Notice how many products around you get replaced by services.

I don't like it at all.

[kunglao]

Hmm, there are many companies where what you proposed make sense. But there are also many that I think it's hard to debate that SaaS doesn't offer value.

Running the mail server is simple enough, but then you need to set up storage. Emails are sensitive and often can't afford to lose. Then you need to set up backs, monitor and regularly test DR scenarios to see if your failovers, recovery plans are operational. Of course you need to maintain your data centers as well if you don't want subscriptions.

Then think of login. Employees don't want to log in to 15 different software. So they are going to ask for SSO. You are going to have to deploy and maintain something like active directory. Sometimes they need to be maintained across networks between different offices that are far from each other. After all this, you will still have to buy support packages from principle vendors for times when things go wrong (and they go wrong all the time when you host your own stuff). Shit escalates mate.

[thu2111]

But this work scales better than linearly. One sysadmin, if doing their job properly, can configure a robust backup solution once and it will apply to many different programs. Machines in a DC can be set up once and host many programs.

Login is surely one of the best arguments for non-SaaS solutions. SSO is a total mess in the SaaS world. Everyone ends up with a billion passwords that they manage individually, change at different times, have to use a password manager to keep track of (but they all use different ones), etc. Active Directory is actually a solution to that which got lost in the move to SaaS-in-the-cloud.