Software-as-a-service
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JC pontificates about technology
An occasional series.
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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?