[gspencley]

SaaS stands for "software as a service." When I think of SaaS I think of subscription-based software. It is usually web-based (meaning web applications that run in a browser and talk to a remote server), but I can't think of any reason that it necessarily has to be, and one could probably call newer versions of Photoshop / Adobe Creative Cloud "SaaS" since that is subscription based.

This distinguishes SaaS from traditional software that was sold as a good. In the good-based model, you purchased a copy of a particular version of the software and could install it and use it independently, on your own machine, no remote servers required for the rest of your life without requiring any "services" from the creator of that that software for the normal every day operation of that software.

As someone else already pointed out, all software (and most hardware) is an abstraction over top of something more primitive.

But to say that all SaaS is a "wrapper" around another service seems to be making the case that SaaS as such cannot provide original functionality that is not exposed by some preexisting lower-level service and that's not true. I currently work for a SaaS company and while we do provide integration with 3rd party services, our core functionality is entirely developed in-house. Our databases which store customer data are analogous to what storage devices on our customers' own devices would be doing if it were good-based software.