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I've read scuttlebutt about M$ moving Windows to a SaaS model, but I fail to
understand how this could possibly work.
Leaving aside what I personally think of the whole Software as a Service model,
I can understand, after a fashion, why it might be appealing for a development
team to be able to issue mass updates to subscribers, rather than waiting for
people to upgrade and continuing to offer backwards support and compatibility
for legacy versions.
And the idea of having a few.. hundred... million customers paying you $20 a
month forever sure must seem like a Good Idea to the executives of companies
that already have more money than Croesus.
That said: I personally believe that it would stifle innovation, since an
independent developer couldn't test a program on their own machine, but would be
forced to run it in a sandbox VM.
This is pretty much the dilemma I'm having with iOS apps at the moment. I
despise what Apple has done to iTunes, and there are features that I would love
to implement into a music player, but unless I jailbreak my iPod, I can't write
a program solely for my own, personal edification, and use it. In order to get
the app on my iPod, as I understand it, I would have to have it digitally
signed, for which I would have to pay, and have the app reviewed by Apple (which
requires showing them the code -- yeah... No). Or have an Enterprise Developer
license which costs an insane amount of money.
In reality, I understand that there are probably music players already on the
app store that do most, if not all, of the things I want to do; however, sifting
through them is a pain, and I could potentially learn something by doing it
myself.
But I digress.
As I aspire to, one day, program for a living -- A topic not for discussion on a
public forum -- I am interested in the various development and marketing models
used in the industry, and often find myself at odds with various philosophies,
but I try to remain open minded.
Anybody else have thoughts on the SaaS model?
Regards,
A.D.B.
P.S. If anyone knows of a good music player for the iOS that sports an
attractive interface and allows you to construct and save ad-hoc playlists on
the fly (e.g. building a temporary playlist while playing the songs on it.) I
would appreciate suggestions.
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On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 00:12:26 -0400, Anthony D. Baye wrote:
> Anybody else have thoughts on the SaaS model?
Having worked for both a traditional software company and a software
company that currently offers both SaaS and on-premise solutions, I can
see why the SaaS model is attractive to a software company.
Recurring revenue helps you grow the business.
Traditional perpetual license models mean that the customer buys the
product once. They may have to license it for a number of users or
servers, but ultimately, the cost is pretty low over the lifetime of the
product.
That's good for the customer that doesn't want to continually upgrade.
Most customers, though, want the latest and greatest features and
functionality - and a subscription model (which is common with SaaS
products), done properly, funds ongoing development. Anyone who has
worked retail knows that the cost of acquiring a new customer is pretty
high; the cost of retaining a customer is relatively low, as long as you
keep the customer happy. The SaaS subscription model works off that
fundamental idea in retail business.
In order to retain customers, you have to listen to them and implement
what they're looking for. That's a lot easier when you can afford to pay
developers a decent salary and can grow the development team (and design
team - design is very important in software development, and a lot of
companies fail to design well before implementing the product).
If you'd asked me 10 years ago what I thought of SaaS, I'd have said that
I thought it was a scam. Now that I've seen it up close in a company
that sells with that model, and have had the growth trajectory explained
by financial people who understand it *and* who understand how to explain
it, I see the benefits, both to the company and to the customer and end
user.
A loyal customer for a software company isn't a customer who buys once
and never comes back - even if they never change products. A loyal
customer is a customer who continues to fund further development so the
developers can continue to improve the product for the benefit of the
customer.
Jim
--
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw
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On 7/30/2015 9:48 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> If you'd asked me 10 years ago what I thought of SaaS, I'd have said that
> I thought it was a scam. Now that I've seen it up close in a company
> that sells with that model, and have had the growth trajectory explained
> by financial people who understand it *and* who understand how to explain
> it, I see the benefits, both to the company and to the customer and end
> user.
>
> A loyal customer for a software company isn't a customer who buys once
> and never comes back - even if they never change products. A loyal
> customer is a customer who continues to fund further development so the
> developers can continue to improve the product for the benefit of the
> customer.
>
> Jim
>
However... With respect, I already pay like $30-40 a month for access to
certain online games. To suggest that I have to pay for the OS they run
on as well, and a similar amount.. is, to me, a huge fuck you to me, and
anyone either unwilling, or unable, to keep paying for such a thing.
So.. No, I can see a "service", or even some "software", being paid for
this way, though I despise the idea for something I need only rarely,
but... to pay for an OS in such a manner is tantamount to making someone
rent the car, then the tires, then the gas in the tank, then have a
special license to drive on your own street, another to drive in the
city, and yet another to drive highways, and on, and on, and on.
It may be a wet dream, to the assholes doing it, but, its precisely the
reason everyone is against the attempts to kill net neutrality, among
other one sided, highway robbery, style attempts to make every single
fart cost you money, before you even **get** to the actual feature you
are trying to use in the first place.
So, no... its still a scam, when used to bludgeon people into paying for
things they need, but can't otherwise get. And, if Microsoft thinks this
is a sensible method... then maybe someone should ask them why, then,
they "sell" the xbox, instead of just renting it, for one example.... It
amounts to the same thing.
--
Commander Vimes: "You take a bunch of people who don't seem any
different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get
this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem."
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> I've read scuttlebutt about M$ moving Windows to a SaaS model, but I fail to
> understand how this could possibly work.
Locally you'd have an OS that was stripped down to just run Remote
Desktop (or equivalent) and interface with your hardware. When you
logged on it would start a remote desktop session with an MS VM
somewhere. *Assuming internet speeds were fast enough* you wouldn't
notice the difference to running full windows locally.
The benefits are obvious (a machine that has all your files and looks
the same no matter where you log on, an almost limitless supply of CPU
power and RAM if you wanted to do CPU intenstive tasks, automatic
backups for everyone, etc), I fail to understand how you fail to
understand how this could possibly work :-)
> Leaving aside what I personally think of the whole Software as a Service model,
> I can understand, after a fashion, why it might be appealing for a development
> team to be able to issue mass updates to subscribers, rather than waiting for
> people to upgrade and continuing to offer backwards support and compatibility
> for legacy versions.
Their big problem will be the medium-large corporations that take
months, if not years to test and roll out major software updates. There
is no way they would accept the possibility of one day their entire
company coming to a halt with millions of pounds lost due to an MS
"update" that has broken something somewhere within their business. Also
a lot of systems are not connected to the internet for various reasons,
how would they work?
> That said: I personally believe that it would stifle innovation, since an
> independent developer couldn't test a program on their own machine, but would be
> forced to run it in a sandbox VM.
If the whole of windows and all apps are running on a remote VM, then I
don't see why you wouldn't just fire up Visual Studio (or whatever) on
the same remote machine. You'd be using exactly the same environment as
everyone else to develop and test your app.
> This is pretty much the dilemma I'm having with iOS apps at the moment. I
> despise what Apple has done to iTunes, and there are features that I would love
> to implement into a music player, but unless I jailbreak my iPod, I can't write
> a program solely for my own, personal edification, and use it.
I see no indication that MS would follow such a route, if they wanted to
they could have done so already. That's just Apple being Apple, and
their philosophy that if they control everything the user will have a
better experience.
> In reality, I understand that there are probably music players already on the
> app store that do most, if not all, of the things I want to do; however, sifting
> through them is a pain, and I could potentially learn something by doing it
> myself.
Sounds to me like you should have bought an Android phone. One click in
Eclipse (free) on my desktop PC and my app is compiled, sent to my phone
and running within a few seconds.
> As I aspire to, one day, program for a living -- A topic not for discussion on a
> public forum -- I am interested in the various development and marketing models
> used in the industry, and often find myself at odds with various philosophies,
> but I try to remain open minded.
If you're interested you might like to try and do some financial
modelling of the SaaS model for Windows. You can probably find out how
many copies of Windows MS sells, how much income they've got from that
over the years etc. Try and predict that if they continued with the same
model how well would the company be doing in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years
time.
Then assume they switched to a SaaS model at some point in the future.
You'd need to make many assumptions about many different items. But you
should be able to predict the profit they would make after such a
switch. How does it compare to your previous predictions? How sensitive
is it to changes in your assumptions? What is the optimum subscription
price? How to handle business users? When it the optimum time to stop
support for old versions of Windows?
No doubt MS has teams of people doing exactly the above (with access to
far more information than publically available). *If* the calculations
show more profit with low enough risk can be achieved with the SaaS
model then the executives will make the decision.
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On 7/31/2015 9:56 AM, scott wrote:
>> I've read scuttlebutt about M$ moving Windows to a SaaS model, but I
>> fail to
>> understand how this could possibly work.
>
> Locally you'd have an OS that was stripped down to just run Remote
> Desktop (or equivalent) and interface with your hardware. When you
> logged on it would start a remote desktop session with an MS VM
> somewhere. *Assuming internet speeds were fast enough* you wouldn't
> notice the difference to running full windows locally.
>
> The benefits are obvious (a machine that has all your files and looks
> the same no matter where you log on, an almost limitless supply of CPU
> power and RAM if you wanted to do CPU intenstive tasks, automatic
> backups for everyone, etc), I fail to understand how you fail to
> understand how this could possibly work :-)
No, no, no!
Have you ever worked on a thin client?
I'd rather use a Teletype as a dumb terminal.
;)
--
Regards
Stephen
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> No, no, no!
>
> Have you ever worked on a thin client?
> I'd rather use a Teletype as a dumb terminal.
>
> ;)
You need a fatter client and/or a fatter pipe then :-)
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On 7/31/2015 2:02 PM, scott wrote:
>> No, no, no!
>>
>> Have you ever worked on a thin client?
>> I'd rather use a Teletype as a dumb terminal.
>>
>> ;)
>
> You need a fatter client and/or a fatter pipe then :-)
>
On my last contract, even the local IT manager hated it.
--
Regards
Stephen
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>>> Have you ever worked on a thin client?
>>> I'd rather use a Teletype as a dumb terminal.
>>>
>>> ;)
>>
>> You need a fatter client and/or a fatter pipe then :-)
>>
>
> On my last contract, even the local IT manager hated it.
I don't know what you mean by "it" - here we use remote desktop pretty
much daily to work on machines in the labs (mainly because we are lazy
and don't want to get up). Once you make it full screen it's easy to
forget you're actually in remote desktop rather than your native OS.
However I've used it from home a few times and it's more obvious you're
on remote desktop, window dragging is not as smooth, updates are
noticeably slower. Hence my comment that once internet speeds are fast
enough I see those issues going away for RD.
But from the other angle you have things like Office and Google Docs
that work in a browser, and using those even on relatively slow
connections seem fine. So maybe Windows SaaS could be no more than a
"start page" in a browser used to launch other web-based apps? Who
knows, there are many possibilities.
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On 7/31/2015 2:49 PM, scott wrote:
> I don't know what you mean by "it" -
Information Technology, young man.
> here we use remote desktop pretty
> much daily to work on machines in the labs (mainly because we are lazy
> and don't want to get up). Once you make it full screen it's easy to
> forget you're actually in remote desktop rather than your native OS.
>
> However I've used it from home a few times and it's more obvious you're
> on remote desktop, window dragging is not as smooth, updates are
> noticeably slower. Hence my comment that once internet speeds are fast
> enough I see those issues going away for RD.
>
I think that you are in a privileged position. You work in the
automotive industry and in R&D. When I was working at Mercedes the IT
systems were top notch. Really good, you wouldn't know that you were
working remotely. Unfortunately most of the companies and sites I've
been at that is not the case. One site I worked at we called the system
Godot as we were always waiting for it. ;-)
The number of times I have forgotten what I was going to do by the time
the machine had drawn the screen are legend. Not all the time of course
but enough to raise raise your frustration levels to boiling point.
> But from the other angle you have things like Office and Google Docs
> that work in a browser, and using those even on relatively slow
> connections seem fine. So maybe Windows SaaS could be no more than a
> "start page" in a browser used to launch other web-based apps? Who
> knows, there are many possibilities.
>
I wish I lived in your world. :)
--
Regards
Stephen
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> I think that you are in a privileged position. You work in the
> automotive industry and in R&D.
You must have a good memory, because I quit that job over 3 years ago
:-) This place makes industrial printing equipment. Still I think any
bargain PC can handle remote desktop, the bottleneck seems to be the
internet connection between my house network and my work network. Remote
desktop works seamlessly within each network, but try to access one from
the other and it is very awkward to use.
> The number of times I have forgotten what I was going to do by the time
> the machine had drawn the screen are legend. Not all the time of course
> but enough to raise raise your frustration levels to boiling point.
Oh that happens regularly here too on other system, just not seen it on
remote desktop across the same network. Try getting in to work and then
waiting over 30 mins for your PC to boot. I just lock mine over night now.
> I wish I lived in your world. :)
I'd find out a bit more about it first if I were you :-)
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