The Great SaaS Gaslight

• Pay as you go
• Just pay for what you need
• Free up time
• Free up capital
• Focus on your business not the technology

But that’s not quite the way it worked out, is it?

Maybe they meant it when they said it, but it is not the driving force behind the great SaaS purveyors of our day. Yeah, I am looking at you Microsoft, you too Google, and where do you think you’re hiding Intuit? There is nothing wrong with creating a product that your customer wants to buy, but something is off when the customer is forced to buy something they don’t want. Customer needs are completely secondary to customer lock-in. Sadly, the SaaS model has become too big to care about customers. They spew customer satisfaction surveys at you after every interaction in an effort to show that they care. But these surveys are just another brick in the big data wall. The results are secondary. They kind of care what you think…but mostly they just need you to hang around and keep paying. They collect the data to guide incremental improvements around the edges.

The irony is that just about every SaaS vendor has created the role of customer success manager. These are people that are assigned to your account to help you onboard and have success with the product to keep you from off-boarding. Success doesn’t necessarily translate into helping your organization succeed, just that you ‘succeed’ enough with the product.

I don’t begrudge anyone’s success in creating a product that customers find useful and want to buy. That is not an easy thing to do. But after a while, the SaaS business model is not about customer success or satisfaction anymore. It is about customer submission and inertia. At a certain point, the customer base becomes too big and the product becomes too big to change.

Safety in Numbers

It is the path of least resistance. If everyone else is doing it, it must be good or at least good enough. Plus, there is value in the network effect. Yet, numbers are only safe up to a point. Numbers blind you to unseen risks. Black swan type risks. Rare, but catastrophic. They are so rare and potentially disastrous that no one really thinks about them.

Maybe your backup, disaster recovery, business continuity or whatever they are calling it these days will save you from a single system failing, but it won’t protect you from context and know-how loss. The real problem isn’t loss, it’s accumulation. Too many programs, too many APIs, too many integrations, too much complexity masquerading as sophisticated systems. Context recovery systems don’t exist, yet successful organizations rely on context, not data. Terabytes of data mean nothing without knowing why you have the data, what it means and how you need to make use of it. Maybe the software rules take care of it, but that is a dangerous thing to rely on.

Information and content is infinite and stochastic. It is not necessarily predictable. More information doesn’t lead to better decisions, it just leads to more data.

This preys on the fear and risk of not knowing.

You can never know all the information before you have to make a decision, but when faced with unknowns and uncertainty, adopting “best practices” provides a cozy security blanket.

Undifferentiated Best Practices

Gotta love the industry ‘best practice’ templates. About a million years ago, I remember an old printed newsletter called the ‘Best Practices Report’ which featured, you guessed it, best practices. The trouble with best practices — then and now — is that they pretend that the world has stopped changing. But the reality is, the world is not static. Things change. You need to keep getting better, you need to keep evolving. Blindly adopting templated best practices is not a path to be best (to paraphrase someone), but rather a path to bland mediocrity.

This preys on the ‘why reinvent the wheel’ logic. Why spend the time and effort on figuring out something that has already been solved.

The reality is that you will be really good at achieving parity with your competition.

Bland and Generic Applications

Speaking of bland mediocrity, all you have to do is to look at the landscape of commercial software. There are thousands of applications across thousands of categories, but we are still getting different takes on note taking or calendar applications.

Some programs might look prettier or feel more intuitive, but they are tackling the same problems.

Software keeps iterating on solving the same soluble problems because the remaining challenges are really difficult to solve with technology. Communication and coordination are full of nuance and subtleties that defy digitization.

This is not unique to SaaS vendors, but most, if not all, software vendors have jumped on the SaaS bandwagon for marketing and selling their products. The free version that does just enough to lure you into the paying membership. Then you face the standard three options to subscribe with the good, better, best offers.

Adding communication tools hasn’t improved the quality of communication despite massively increasing the volume of communication.

Let’s Go to the Mall

SaaS has become the technology American shopping mall of the 1980s. It is overpriced and predictable. The goods are largely the same in every mall. This is not a dynamic market. It is very much a controlled market. The landlord sets up the platform and the retailers rush in to this great location to make the huge profits and get the advantages of scale. The retailers that can afford the mall’s rates, have very controlled experiences. The mall of the 1980s was not a place of bold experimentation and risk taking. The risk was signing the lease.

While Google and Microsoft are stores in the mall, they are also the landlords. They control the mall experience. Apple runs its own mall — just shinier, not different. (Today’s physical malls would be ghost towns without an Apple Store bringing in traffic.)

Somewhere along the line, the culture tired of the mall experience. Across the country, the US is full of abandoned malls. The model works up to a point and then the fashion changes.

The small store with the carefully curated merchandise appears on the scene and draws in its crowd.

The future is much the same for Information Technology. The point is not to have the same system that everyone else does. The point is to have the information system that works for you.

This issue of the newsletter was written on a self hosted WordPress site on multiple devices with no monthly fees.