[constantcrying]

I think the article fails to address the appeal of SaaS. The industry isn't massive for no reason and ignoring the lasting popularity makes the subject difficult to understand.

SaaS exists because managing software is hard. The easiest way to get money from a company is to make problems go away. SaaS means your data is stored remotely (you don't have to worry about maintaining your own servers, Databases, synchronization, liability goes to the SaaS company), updates come when they come (your internal support couldn't help, it's someone else's problem anyway), the spread sheets they are replacing were hated anyway and caused constant problems.

[sevensor]

This is what I think people don't get about SaaS: they think it's about the first S. The technology. It's not. It's about the second S: the people who keep the technology from collapsing into a black hole of complexity. I've worked at a place with an AWS bill that could have paid for multiple employees. We weren't paying for the software, we were paying for it always to be running. Competent people who are willing to carry pagers are expensive and hard to find. The genius of AWS is that Amazon hires a lot of those people and obscures their existence by putting an API and a bunch of crooked salesmen in front of them.