To SaaS or Not to SaaS, That is the Question

I visit Joel Spolsky site Joel on Software on a regular basis since I came upon this excellent article on The Law of Leaky Abstraction. He is a very good writer. Not only does he write well but other articles and blogs he refers are an excellent source for further reading.

Recently I was looking at Where There's Muck There's Brass. This talks about the myriad challenges that a developer faces getting software run in diverse environment as a consequence of deploying it at customer sites. He is referring to managing the complexity of disparate OSes, database vendors, web servers, and application server amongst other variables that the product would need to handle.

One of the references include a post by Jason Fried from 37signals on why they would not consider installing software at customer premises. To quote him It would be highly unlikely that we’d sell installable software. His reasons, to list a few, are

1. Hosted solution implies controlled development and deployment environment
2. Keeps them small and agile
3. Avoids backward compatibility headaches
   

On the other hand, Joel states that 4 out of 5 of his customers opt for installing it themselves and hence he now has four times the sales opportunity. Interesting perspective. He also makes a telling point with this comment The one thing that so many of today's cute startups have in common is that all they have is a simple little Ruby-on-Rails Ajax site that has no barriers to entry and doesn't solve any gnarly problems. Bottom line, his point is, people normally pay for solving difficult problems not easy ones.

As always there is no one way!!

If you thinking about your strategy for selling web based software, both these articles provide good reasons why Jason and Joel did what they did. You now can make an educated decision rather than follow the herd one way or the other.

For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past 4-5 years and have just now come out of hibernation, here is a good reference for SaaS.