Ugh.

This rant against SaaS completely forgets what things were like before SaaS and where upgrades were only done every few years.

The idea behind SaaS is to align the buyers and the sellers on long term support for the software. Prior to SaaS, the software seller only had to earn the sale once every few years, and the seller also had a serious revenue problem in having to fund development for 3-5 years based on ever decreasing sales of the prior version.

The team doing bug fixes was understaffed, if they were staffed at all, since everything was focused on "the next big release". Software kept rotting away year after year until it became less and less usable, and you could only hope that your employer eventually upgraded to a newer version.

> Microsoft Teams is universally-loathed and regularly threatens to crash every time you load it.

He obviously never used the predecessor to MS teams, Office Communicator. It was... bare bones and failed at a lot of tasks very frequently, such as making calls. (It did have some cool features that, when they worked, were nice).

> entire companies that exist to sell other companies' (like Microsoft)'s software

Partner resellers have been a thing since literally forever, this is not new to the SaaS world.

> developers that cost six figures that develop just for Salesforce

Developers specialized in one platform have also been a thing forever, same as Oracle Developers or even Windows developers back when that was a thing.

> They also make money — though not as much — by selling a variety of managed services.

Every large tech company has been selling enterprise support plans since, quite literally, mainframes were invented.

When I worked there, Microsoft's enterprise support was absurdly good. If you had a high enough support plan, bugs could get escalated to the dev team who made the product and they'd roll a fix just for your particular issue. Sadly that type of support is mostly non-existent now across the entire industry.

> The goal of these programs, as I've suggested, is to anchor you to an ecosystem. The more money you spend — hiring developers to code specifically for one platform, paying for specialized support from one platform, adding users and add-ons and storing data and doing stuff on a system — the more costly it becomes to leave, and said cost becomes only more burdensome the larger your organization becomes.

This is not new to SaaS. Platform lock-in has been a play for decades. Microsoft did it in the 90s, IBM did it prior.

Everyone wants to achieve lock-in because large software projects are just not that profitable without a surrounding ecosystem.

> Well, have you ever used a piece of software at a company you work for that sucks? Was it sold by Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, Atlassian or another big SaaS company? Well, it was probably bought by somebody who doesn't use the software, and it'll cost far more to remove than your annoyance matters.

Again, not a SaaS thing. Arguably SaaS has made this better by funding continual ongoing development of software. Prior to SaaS, it was "here is the software, enjoy what you have because nothing is getting fixed!" (Outside of maybe 1 or 2 updates shipped on CDs across 3 or 4 years!)

> Microsoft in particular has monetized this chaos by selling you an entire suite of apps.

Microsoft has always been selling a suite of apps. The suite has expanded over time, but Office traditionally included an entire database! Products come and go from the Office Suite, but again, this is nothing new.

All this said, is there a bubble? Probably. Imagine if everyone in America is working for a company that is buying into MS's SaaS portfolio. At that point, if MS wants to grow revenue 10%, the entire economy needs to grow at least 10%, or some other portion of the economy has to shrink. Now if the software makes everyone 15% more productive (woohoo!) and if MS can shave off 10 points of that for themselves, so be it.

But at some point we'll have reached maximum productivity, maximum output, and software won't help us do our jobs any better.

> You'll notice, of course, the very obvious problem: that it isn't obvious what any of these AI-powered products do, and when you finally work it out, they don't seem to do that much.

The author, in this post and the last, craps on AI, but does so from the perspective of someone who has only read press releases from mega-corps.

Right now companies are adopting AI and saving tons of money. From voice AI agents (that you cannot tell are voice AI agents!) at call centers, to dramatically speeding up how fast unstructured data can be processed. Real money is being made, real savings are being had, and real productivity is happening. It Office co-pilot amazing? Meh. Is Google probably losing money hand over foot with its AI features? Likely so. Are a lot of low-key industries adopting specialized AI tools to save on money? Yup.