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 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 — a.k.a. refugee managing 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?
The reg tech business model conundrum
Lesson one: Insist on an unsupervised pilot where real users get to push and pull the product by themselves without help from the vendor, and not just a chaperoned proof of concept where the software vendor can control inputs and outcomes to make the product seem satisfactory.
It is a familiar experience amongst buyers of reg tech and legal tech that hawked products do fabulously when demonstrated to the general counsel at the pitch (often by performing some kind of magic on a pre-prepared non-disclosure agreement), but underwhelm upon implementation when set upon by the morlocks who actually need to use them to solve real-life problems.
This is partly because the yen to be thought-leadings agents for step-change in their industry, plays to a general counsel’s innate credulity and weakness for flattery, but has a profounder operating cause: reg tech struggles mightily with a business model that scales. reg tech strives to automate tedious, repetitive and manual tasks, thereby removing a significant cost item from the departmental budget, and accelerating and improving the output quality at the same time.
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?