The mistake is thinking the first S is what people pay for when it is the second S.
For people who don't know Bending Spoons, their strategy works as follows:
1. Buy SaaS company
2. Set up new product team of 15 people in Europe
3. Re-implement backend on Bending Spoons technical platform
4. Make the original company (100 people?) redundant
But what I find interesting is that their technical platform is fifty different generic reusable parts that work on whatever they put on top of it: Vimeo, Evernote, Miro, Airtable.
Combing back to OccupySaaS: there could be real value in a 'generic core' and then re-engineer all SaaS solutions on top. And then to get service again for the core.
the software is hardly any difficult but sales or customer acquisition.
Very interesting. Any idea what those parts are and/or how they work?
– "Xina", alternative to Adjust.com or Kochava or AppsFlyer, written in Rust
– "Pantheon", inference platform/VMs to run Al models on GPUs
- "Minerva", AI-based user lifetime value estimates
– "Juno", payment management
– "Galf", access control
– "Matrix", UX patterns
– "Pico", data ingestion (user analytics)
– "Lumen", data transformation
– "Abacus", data computation
– "Janus", experimentation toolkit
– "Orion", experimentation toolkit
– "Role Model", AI hiring
– "Crystal", market intelligence (helps find targets to acquire)Completely forgetting, security updates with regression testing , backups, data structuring, performance engineering.
But hey, it gives a living to many HNers so it's good!
You might not have per-seat pricing but still all the feature negotiations with product owner, all the salary negotiations with developers - oh wait nowadays we have AI providers that will hike token prices ;)
Is this true in other industries? I suppose there’s probably car people who don’t understand that most people don’t buy cars because they love cars. They buy what cars do. If they could get what cars do without having to hassle with a car they would.
The people who buy software are not the ones who pay the bill. If you hire a contractor to build custom-tailored software:
- If it is buggy or lacking, you'll be blamed.
- If it gets hacked, you'll be fired.
- If it works well and saves the company millions, you get a pat on the back.
The incentives are off. Why on earth would you not go with the established provider?
The only thing we need to do now is not second S. Companies who build first S, while letting companies keep their data within their own walls, are going to be future winners. In other words, we are returning back to pre-SaaS era but allowing flexibility of Companies to run first S on their own systems (actually run it on their own systems and not via a VPC).
Even what the OP posted is bound to fail because Companies have realized the value of the data they hold, especially in this AI age. They are not willing to part with their data as easily as they did before (see how many companies are wanting to move over from traditional ERPs to SaaS/Cloud ERPs. many are not willing to upgrade).
However that does open space for free software plus pay for supporting it. Good example would be WPEngine maybe. You can easily move from them to someone else if you use WP. Not so easy to move from Jira to something else because then the software changes.
Especially during the current time of unprecedented pace of security patching, decrying this as "enterprise box-checking" couldn't be be more displaced.
Each focal area is getting DRIs, and we're doing cross-cutting work to make everything componetizable and cross-platform.
We're scaling up the scope of our mission and ambition, too. We view software freedom as not just applications, but also infrastructure and weights. There are a lot of things we want to contribute to ensure the OpenAIs and Anthropics don't become the next extractive monopolies.
> Does the stability approach, say, Photopea?
We had some debate internally about whether to begin diverging the project from what Adobe does and begin innovating on our own.
We instead decided that 100% feature parity is the goal. Parity is a milestone for us because it validates what we've done, and it also serves the muscle memory of the tens of thousands of Adobe users.
After we hit parity, we can easily turn our applications into entirely new ones with more opinionated UI/UX and net new features.
But I'd much rather have bulletproof linked file support than "concept to vector" or "live paint" (as cool as those are)
Love to see this rebellious spirit of sovereignty and collective action. It's what made the "hacker culture" great.
Seeing the meteoric success of the ArtCraft series of applications, I'm hopeful and looking forward to the positive disruption of the industry, by the makers, for the makers - and screw the takers.
On the same hardware (128GB RAM), there's just no comparison. Much faster, and better in every way, I don't see myself using Photopea again.
Thank you!
I think many of us as a collective profession are going to be doing this.
We're going to open source apps, then infrastructure, then weights. The hyperscalers created the seeds of their own moat dismantlement.
Web 1.0 was great - forums, personal websites, IRC, a million chat options, RSS, APIs. It was this way because the world was technical and everyone had energy to do things. It was a Wild West, and it was fun. You could buy and own things back then.
Web 2.0 brought on our parents and grandparents to the world of broadband. Most of the new users were non-technical, so the tech of Web 1.0 got simplified into "product". The sharp edges were removed, and everything became simple. Over time the leaders built up their moats, removed APIs, turned into walled garden silos. Companies began to become extractive and enshittify their products.
Today the conditions that led to Web 2.0 are no longer true. It doesn't take a ton of energy to build things, and it doesn't require deeply technical people to do it either.
The entire tech sector is going to be a blood bath. Where there were once moats and monopolies, there's now going to be prolific and wide spread open source and a market rife with competition.
Big tech is turning into the food service industry. Passion driven, distributed, highly competitive, though probably lower margin. Plenty of opportunity for small businesses.
(I hope you guys make a Google docs style cooperative mode. For simple edits this already beats the MS Office suite, but Office 365 cooperation still sucks, so if you can get that working fast ... exiting times)
The difference will be that they can have rent seeking practices when the software itself cant be taken hostage. They'll charge for the service and wont leech off the user for way more money than they deserve for making and maintaining the software
1. Alert is created due to something in the SaaS not working
2. On-call engineer is pinged
3. On-call engineer creates an issue with the SaaS provider
4. On-call engineer twiddles their thumbs waiting for an update from the SaaS provider
I've been that on-call engineer dozens of times. I'd rather be able to have some kind of agency when triaging an issue.
All the incumbents should be afraid of pissed off engineers trying to get their business or building custom stacks inside their biggest clients. Screaming into the void by releasing more code isn't going to move the needle.
The OccupySaaS people are delusional thinking that the system works well enough and is honest enough that a solution exists within the confines of that system. Same delusion the Occupy Wall Street folks had. Didn't work out for David Graeber, did it? The tech sector is fully and thoroughly owned. We're not heading towards feudalism. It's already tech feudalism. The tech landscape has been fully monopolized. You can't do any business in tech without the approval of a tech overlord.
There is 'how the situation looks' and then there is reality which is 100 times worse.
I pay for Fastmail and I don't know anybody there. Same with Microsoft 365. I wish I was friends with the Roshal brothers!
What you mention, is a case of private sector corruption and I've seen it first hand, but I wouldn't say it's normal or even discuss it as regular practice.
In my B2B days I definitely saw deals made among friends like that, but I mostly saw salespeople inviting potential customers to expensive dinners that did not end in a sale. Failed cronyism then?
Every service has a moat; sometimes a technical one (I.e. block competitors as spammers), sometimes the moat is regulations (Are you SOC2 compliant?); other times it's just a business contract between people who belong to the same club.
Richard Stallman must have looked almost as delusional when he started a free compiler and an OS in the 80s.
Worst part is when they used to leave their cushy big tech job and then the algorithms helped them drive traffic to their new startups. It's like people get a special flag on their projects when they are ex-FAANG which helps them get discovered. I don't know if this still happens now though.