Is Software As A Service (SaaS) a bad thing?
Is Software as a Service (SaaS) necessarily a bad thing? Are online, company hosted applications (like Office 365, Google Docs, etc.) all bad? Are there good ways to do SaaS? If a SaaS application/website is compliant with the AGPL… is that… good?
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The reason I hate SaaS: it presumes I have access to internet all the time.
@Kenneth Darlington You make a good argument. I think the salient question is how many layers of dependencies are reasonable? I suppose the market will ultimately “decide”.
@Mathias Kandelborg I hope that you understand that programs that can just be downloadable like word processors, games not requiring an internet connection, and other applications that can be easily run on someone’s low powered computer but are served as SaaS are what I have a problem with. If it’s SaaS that provides a service that a typical PC could never support on its own without infrastructure of other interacting services in the company to provide a tangible benefit for the user, that is totally fine with me.
@SimGunther It’s mostly not a bad idea to continually spend money in order to keep things going. What happens when you stop maintaining whatever?
Paying each month makes sure you don’t have to do that job.
The reason I hate SaaS: it presumes that you want to “rent” time with the software rather than let you have it on your computer forever. Innovation, yeah right; let’s all go back to the future… the future of 1975 where time sharing was a thing – __ –
@SimGunther It makes sense when you have a hardware constraint, though.
Notepad comes really close to being an example of perpetually supported software…
I was going to say txt files!
I came down here LITEREALLY to say just that! bravo!
SaaS means ‘your’ software has a landlord who keeps the key, and can decide whether to let you in or kick you out – think about it….
Never make your need someone else’s choice. Down with the SaaS.
Spot on, Bryan. I avoid on principle any SaaS platform that hosts any content that I can’t export into a standard file format at the very least.
Amazing video, bless you.
Man I miss the original Yahoo [circa 1999]. When they categorized websites for casual browsing as an alternative to the search function.
Just don’t forget about SAAS platform, you watching this video on??
I still use AutoCAD 2004. The newer versions are Software as a Slavery. You’re not allowed to own AutoCAD you just keep paying the monthly bill to keep grandma on life support.
One good example of a locally hosted service is OpenFire. We put together out own Ubuntu server and it meets the needs of a 30 person office at a Fortune 500 company.
It’s actually a huge problem in the gaming industry right now, online-only games keep getting shut down like no one’s business, and if you liked the game or paid anything for it – tough luck, it’s not coming back.
@MyTech skyrim doesnt need internet access
How many players are still roaming the wilds of Skyrim? Probably around half of them, even though the original console hardware stopped production years ago.
@Ari Finkelman even though you say 99.99% of the players don’t care about the game when it’s being shut down, conversely in 99.99% of the cases there are still players that do care about it, unless the game dies just a few days/weeks after launch. But the point is, any game that becomes perpetually unplayable is a waste, and it could be prevented if companies followed an ethical way to handle SaaS end-of-life events.
I don’t play many online-only games myself, so I can’t give many examples, but as a Planetside 2 player I do know that Planetside 1 was shut down not long ago while it still had lots of active players, and there’s no reason to think that this will not happen to Planetside 2 in the future.
In any case, if you want a thorough (and opinionated) coverage of the issue, I’d direct you to a youtuber known as Ross Scott, he has a few videos on “Dead Game News”, and in particular he talks about it in his episodes about Battleforge, Darkspore and The Secret World.
While it does happen, I wouldnt say it is a “huge problem.” I have yet to play a game that no longer works, but then Im not playing online-only games that are over a decade old. By the time the servers go offline, 99.99% of the players have long since moved on to another game and will never give that game a second thought.
yep, and when my gamer friends complain about it, i get to tell them about the benefits of open source software
windows? as a service?
no thanks.
What about the idea of SaaS running through sometheing like IPFS or ZeroNet?
Emacs as a service. The horror, the horror. ?
And thus… Linux.
Obviously, by promoting software as a service, companies can keep milking us.
your issue with saas is the same issue i find with it… in my personal opinion, i dont support saas..
Your depth of wisdom is staggering.
It seems like in this video you’re talking about consumer SaaS. Do you have an opinion on enterprise SaaS?
i don’t see how enterprise SaaS is any different. it may be an even bigger problem there when your entire business depends on another business
*Jack Sparrow voice,* It’s all a matter of leverage.
yes, for consumers at least