Software-as-a-service

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ →Go uptown Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. →Go uptown Technology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Software as a service — fondly known as SAAS but known to users as [[rent-seeking as a service — is greedy capitalist rent-seeking by means of intellectual property or some other kind of monopolistic behaviour. It is also basically the only business model reg tech entrepreneurs — aka refugee Latham & Watkins associates with JavaScript developers from Bucharest they found on the dark web — can figure out.

The equivalent of selling a warranty on a toaster. Charging a running cost for a software application which shouldn’t need a lot of maintenance, unless you built it to need maintenance.

If your software were any good you would design a user-interface easy enough for the meatware to deal with so you didn’t need a service contract. Right?

Then there’s blockchain, of course

The latest iteration — talked about in tones of reverent optimism here — is “blockchain as a service”. But a service to whom? And did I hear a siren going off?

See also

• Blockchain
• Rent-seeking
• Reg tech