Slashdot Mirror
The Downsides of Software as Service
JustinBrock writes "Dvorak's article yesterday, entitled Don't Trust the Servers, argues that the danger of software as a service was highlighted when 'the WGA [Windows Genuine Advantage] server outage hit on Friday evening and was finally repaired on Saturday. It was down for 19 long hours.' The whole fiasco raises an interesting perspective on the software as a service 'fetish'. Dvorak highlights it hypothetically: What if the timeline were reversed, and we were moving from online apps to the desktop. Hear his prophecy of the marketing: 'You can image the advertising push. "Now control your own data!" "Faster processing power now." "Cheaper!" "Everything at your fingertips." "No need to worry about network outages." "Faster, cheaper, more reliable." On and on. I can almost hear the marketing types brag about how much better "shrink wrap" software is than the flaky online apps. The best line for the emergence of the desktop computer in a reverse timeline would be "It's about time!"'"
I'm trying to think of the last time I read an article by Dvorak, and said "You know, he's got a good point". It's almost like he intentionally trolls his readership by stating the most outrageous possible point of view, just to stir up hits and discussion.
I prefer total control of my technology
Let's imagine another hypothetical: one where Dvorak is a respected columnist who is taken seriously. I can see the Slashdot comments now: "Wow, another Dvorak article! Hooray!" "No one understands the industry better than Dvorak!" "This is one of the most insightful and valuable things I've read all week!"
Of course, this is just a hypothetical, and like the one in the article itself has little to do with reality.
That being said, application service provisioning seems to be farther off than I had originally thought. If a company who makes the product being served can't keep their servers running, I can see businesses balking at the idea and electing for more traditional, desktop apps.
The game.
If I wanted to read Dvorak's meaningless drivel, I would just read his "blog" independently. He's never said anything even remotely interesting, let alone something that involved actual thought.
It's not like we'll move every single bit of computing into services. We're going to have a little bit of each. Huge growth in personal computing? More software for your PC. Huge growth in the network? Sure, more software as a service.
:)
We'll have both, need both, but will still have a lot of cases where people try to the wrong one and get burnt.
Written without reading TFA (and boy, did it feel good!). I'll read it now.
I lost my sig.
Did anyone else have to do a double take on the author of this article. The more I read, the more I'm thinking it can't be Dvorak right? This is pretty sensible. Rechecked the author when I was done and said, "huh"
I never new there was an Upside!
Hasn't this gone around in cycles already? First there was the mainframe batch processing era where everything was centralized, then the networked-terminal timesharing model where individuals could do stuff but it was all dependent on a central system... this gave way to the early PC era, where individuals could have totally separate machines and do things independently... then everybody got networked and we were back to a more central-controllable system. Because there are advantages and disadvantages of each model, things will keep going back and forth as people react to the issues of the currently-dominant model, whichever one it is.
--Dan
Web Tips
...what a load of crap.
www.purevolume.com/martyd
The article make the assumption that everything is moving from a local desktop computer on to the internet. It is the same with all of those webOS people. There is a time and place for both local and remote services on computers. The WGA has to be remote because windows is cracked so easily on a local scale (not that WGA poses to much of an obstacle). Things like google documents is useful for having a decentralized work environment for papers and makes collaboration easy. However, that does not make office suites extinct...it is simple another option; and since when are more options a bad thing?
(and let the Republicans finish the contract ON "America".)
Communist Party of The United States Of Alphane FP.
P.S. : Be Patriotic: Buy Oil
It's a silly thing to say, really. This falls in the same category as computer predictions made over the years that were based on current trends and technology. The funny thing about technology is that it tends to progress. What he's describing are current limitations, and while accurate, hopefully things will progressand we'll try to come up with solutions to those problems.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
imagine the horror of clients requesting a discount on coding for custom software and expecting the same quality product like hardware
Great. I happen to agree that putting things in networked services just for the sake of having it in networked services is a waste of resources. But since Dvorak came right out and said it now I haven't got a argumentative leg to stand on. It's like a child molester agreeing with me that we ought to have more public parks.
Next thing you know he'll declare how much he likes pizza, completely undermining my fondness of it.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Well, aside from the "discussion" part. It's all about the page hits.
Remember, the more page hits you get, the more important you are. And the more important you are, the more you can charge for advertising on your pages.
Right now the big guns are 100% behind "Software as a Service" (SaaS). Which is the same as being an "Application Service Provider" (ASP) used to be. Which is almost like "Web Apps" were. And so on and so forth.
Software as a service is incredibly useful to smaller enterprises (like mine) that don't have the manpower, money and/or expertise to maintain our own servers. Mission-critical software isn't as simple as 1. install on computer 2. use software. There's uptime to worry about, backups, security, etc. For smaller businesses, it most certainly makes sense to farm this out to experts and take advantage of specialization of labor in terms of cost cost and skill.
At this point in time, software is as complicated and as important to some businesses as say, vehicles are. Only the very largest of companies have their own in-house garage and mechanics to take care of their own vehicles.
I don't respond to AC's.
No, you can compile binaries yourself. And if there was anything in that binary blob, it would have been found by now. All you have to do is look at how the .deb SHOULD look and how it actually looks.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Let me guess....are they GIF's?
www.purevolume.com/martyd
There are benefits to be gotten from both a served-software model and a standard local model, so why not use something like google gears and get the best of both worlds.
Even if you are off the internet at large, we are getting into an age where a personal area network will become ubiquitous. Served-software would still be available from, say, your phone as the server (always keep the gears software on your phone ready for load) or maybe your bluetooth watch could maintain local copies of frequently used software.
While at some remote location you might be lucky to find that a colleague has a local copy of a certain, rarely used software on their wristwatch.
Then again, it is something to think about that within 20 years will it be as unusual to find oneself without internet access as it is to find oneself without electricity...perhaps it will be even more unusual than that (what with satellite communication).
Just thoughts.
It is interesting to note how much more bandwidth my internet connection has as compared to my first computer's bus speed.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Just like anything else, there is a time and a place for software as a service. Some things simply make more sense that way. What about UPS package tracking? Not much point in having that be a standalone application... At the end of the day, developers, even users, have to decide which services make sense to have online as a service or offline as a standalone app. I choose email as a service (gmail) instead of Outlook or Thunderbird. It works for me because I use lots of different computers, and, lets face it, email isn't very much good if you can't get online anyway. OTOH, when I'm downloading emails for Scouts at summer camp, I prefer to use a standalone email application, as I can get online, download all the mail for the day, and disconnect, thus saving the camp phone line (and minimizing my time on a dialup connection). Not only is there room for both, both models make sense depending on your application requirements...
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
What we decide to love, we love. It's amazing that what I assume is an undeniable good can so easily be reversed and I feel the same feeling of undeniable goodness. Perspective is reality--long live widest FOV.
What a breakthrough! I wonder how such an evident truth can even be discussed ...
the summary writer's earnest effort to improve his use of the beg/raise pair of words. I hate to confuse things by complaining about the use of "raise" with "perspective!" Oh well, at least the perspective didn't end up begged.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
It has to happen by chance from time to time...
SAAS has worse problems than server availability. It creates nasty integration problems since your critical enterprise data is not only crossing an interface, but the other side of that interface is not in your control. That's not just an integration problem: I'm waiting for a security breach against one of the big SAAS vendors. And not only is it closed-source, it's closed-source managed by a third party that doesn't have the same priorities that you have. So if you need to fix or customize anything on the SAAS side, you're well and truly screwed.
The only reason SAAS emerged at all was as a response to the poor performance of most in-house corporate IT departments. Why wait for your own geeks to implement something badly in a year when you can go to an ASP who will give it to you in a couple of months? And of course there are the perverse incentives in how capital expenditure is accounted for versus externalized services. But the main motivation is that business managers just don't trust their own IT people. And based on the performance of most IT management, no wonder.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
So once again, I'll read up to the first Dvorak mistake, and then stop.
The first one I got: WGA can't "fail closed", otherwise pirates would just filter the communication to the WGA servers.
Rather, what WGA needs is a signed "check back later" message, where Microsoft's public key is used to sign a "check back by day X" message, so that a server outage can be handled in the future. And I'd bet that there is, by next Patch Tuesday, an upgrade to WGA to support such functionality.
And its not like people's home/office computers are so reliable, making this segque ridiculous.
Test your net with Netalyzr
With Vista, the user has to buy a computer that provides all the ressources and is still depending on some server being available / working correctly.
In this case the WGA server, which does not give any advantage to the user. The only one who has an advantage is Microsoft (from disallowing pirated Windows versions), and that is questionable as I doubt Vista will stay uncracked
C - the footgun of programming languages
I've been against "software as service" (not that I called it that) since the very first maintenance Tuesday for World of Warcraft. There should be a single-player stand-alone version of the game for when the server is down, or any time that I have no network connectivity. It may not be as good as the online version, but it would be *something*, especially as most of my gameplay time is spent running solo anyway.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
that has to be a good thing, no?
so.....how much is Dvorak or his publisher paying for his bi-weekly plug on slashdot?
Stating the obvious, repeats and transcripts in your next InfoWorld or whatever free magazine you get in your mailbox because you're an IT professional.
I never understood the SaaS model and why anyone would want it. You might want it internally within a company in a physical location (kinda like the dumb terminal model) but internet connections and even private MAN or WAN connections are way too unstable in general (count the hours of your internet connection AND remote server AND local maintenance offline in the year, with SaaS, everybody would be non-productive during those hours)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
for startling insights into marketing. (Ok, duh, this is John Dvorak, but still...)
Truly, marketing is designed to convince you that what they've got is much better than what you've got. If you have independent, localized computing, marketing will try to sell you distributed service-based computing. When you've had your fill of service-based computing, well, that's just an opportunity for marketing to sell you independent localized computing.
It's like samsara except that the marketers consider the cycle of rebirth to be good. (They are marketers, after all; enlightenment means that they no longer have anything to sell you!)
I'd have to mod TFA "-1, Obvious".
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
His points are good, and they underscore why I rarely use the latest web apps, but nevertheless am amused by them (Flash-based image editing online!). Still, while we should show his level of skepticism toward many of these apps, the fact is that network-based app delivery still has many advantages. The main one is that you can update software for all your users in one place, and not care as much about the state of the client machines. As a recent Mac convert you'd think Dvorak would particularly like this, since he can do the same things as a web client on a Mac as on Windows or Linux.
Despite the stupidity of some online apps, I can think of a lot of examples of software I would definitely rather have on the web - e-mail (think Gmail or other webmail, which almost everyone uses to some extent), a trouble ticketing system for a helpdesk, a custom database used within a company (most of these are centralized), etc. Onlime apps particularly make sense where the data is centralized as well. That's worth emphasizing: Google Docs and Spreadsheets may be nifty, as well as cheaper than MS Office, but they won't catch on until people see the value in storing the actual files centrally as well, just as they store e-mail centrally when using a service like Hotmail.
I don't know what pisses me off more, that somebody submitted it, that the editors posted it, or that I agree with him.
Anyone else think Dvorak sounds like he should be the evil mantid twin of Zorak?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Software as a service has great benefits for a large number of people/businesses. Sure, if the servers suffer an outage many people are without service, but if the providing company does it right and has proper redundancy and policies in place to minimize such outage as much as possible, the result is much greater uptime then most companies could offer themselves.
How many companies have their own IT department, or even just a full-time IT person? By far the majority of them don't. If they don't, then software as a service makes a lot of sense. Compare 19 hours of downtime to:
"My IT person just left on holidays for two weeks and the servers crashed the day he left."
Even companies with an IT department, if one person is the primary maintainer of a single server, or single service that ends up going down or suffering a major failure, 19 hours of downtime is nothing if that person is out of town or unavailable. What if the servers mainboard fails? How many companies can afford to have a server sitting there ready to go as a hot backup?
Very few.
Software as a service definitely has its uses if done right.
you need a strong, reliable vendor to back it up, obviously.
All these cheap community projects simply don't have the professional and organizational ability... oh wait! Nevermind.
One of them's got to hit the mark sooner or later.
The obvious problem arises when the network goes down,
But there are other "gotchas":
Again, I'm sure there are more that will come up as time goes on.
IMO, any time there's a move to vendor control, let alone remote, removed, vendor control, the end user will lose.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Servers sitting in the machine room don't go down? Of course they do. And they often go down for far longer than 24 hours.
If you want real reliability then you've got to pay for it. And by that I mean a real data center, redundant servers, redundant networks and people competent to manage it all. You know what? It's expensive. The ASPs and SAAS people can do it for less, a lot less.
Deleted
... it's called Webhosting. We've been offering this stuff for years. "Software as a service" is just a new buzzword for people who want to offer ASP-style apps in a windows environment.
Good webhosts have 99.99999% up time. The entire hosting industry measures success by uptime. If it didn't, the industry would collapse.
Dvorak attacks the WGA server that went down, rightfully so. However, he then goes into hyperbole mode and subtly lumps googles offerings in the same category. After using google.com for years, and google maps almost since it was launched, I can tell you I can remember only once significant outage, and it was some kind of DoS attack, I think, which was quickly dealt with. I can remember no minor outages in my experience, nor am I aware of any other outages reported in any major online media.
Yes, you have to be worried about losing your documents. The best ASPs should provide some kind of user data backup (I don't know if Google does this but if they don't they need to) or some kind of contractual obligation to users in case of data loss (more appropriate for Business to business apps). However, if someone provides you with excellent up time and reliability, why can't you trust them?
Microsoft has a lousy track record of reliability. Also, tying hundreds of ASP apps into a single WGA server is ludicrous.
Trust is about experience. Anyone using Microsoft based ASP apps is asking for trouble because the experience of most users is that MS is not reliable. If you want reliability, you need to look elsewhere, and there are plenty of options.
That's what this outage is really telling us. As usual, Dvorak has completely missed the point.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I want to see a +5 troll today. :)
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Well, if your app is hosted internally and goes down for 19 hours, management can beat the staff until morale and uptime improves.
With SAAS, no one is accountable, and the SAAS vendor is probably running the same bloated shiteware as you are internally. They can hire some feckless offshore firm to restart Tomcat every 15 minutes, instead of you doing it.
Everybody wins!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
He seems to be under the impression that WGA is a service Microsoft provides to Windows users.
It isn't.
WGA is a service which Microsoft provides to themselves, in order to protect themselves from said Windows users (AKA thieves).
If the main purpose is to protect your profit center, a 19 hour (or 72, or 30 day) outtage where the failure mode is "more protection" strikes me as perfectly reasonable. It's not like "pissing off customers" has ever been considered a liability in Redmond.
Sucks to be a Windows user, though. Should have got some sort of service agreement, I guess.
c.
Log in or piss off.
3) No desktop installation required - no screwing around with what build works on your particular OS. 4) IT maintenance - while not a big issue for most of us that post here, for all those mere mortals keeping the software up to date, or upgrading to a new version can be a major headache. With software as a service, its done for you. 5) Accessibility - what if you're outside the firewall and can't get thru the VPN? Again, a bigger deal for mere mortals that /.-ers. (of course the disadvantage is no working offline)
6) less start up risk. If I can start with a couple of seats a month for $50/seat versus having to kick out hundreds or thousands of dollars per desktop copy, it's a better deal (well, legally anyways).
7) Generally the Software as a service providers have better backup/recovery processes than the average SMB (think law firm, not software house).
There's lots more reasons of varying importance. I think the parent's point #1 is probably the most relevant of all tho.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
it is completely stupid to make your operating system dependant of an online service, because it will never be 100% of the time online. Anytime you make a program that comunicates with an online system, you have to think what is the workaround when this service is offline. Notice that I said 'when' and not 'if'.Everybody knows that. Apparently, not MS.
...who hated software from servers as a 'service.' I want MY data sitting on MY hardware and I do NOT want to rent, borrow, or steal but OWN the software that's needed to use the data. Also, 'new' hardware and software MUST give me full and complete access to my 'old' data. Is that too much to ask?
Note to Microsoft: I will NEVER use software that doesn't give me the above.
Dvorak is wrong if he thinks a WGA failure is an example of a "software as a service" failure.
WGA isn't a service or a feature. WGA is a license enforcement mechanism. The purpose of license enforcement mechanisms is to prevent you from using features or services. If it didn't work the way you wanted it to work, that's normal -- it isn't supposed to. It's not there to help you. It's there to limit you.
Google Reader and Google Maps are a good example of "software as a service". You can buy shrink-wrap versions of these applications from competitors -- at least you could in the past. Does anyone really think that these apps are going back to the desktop?
3) No desktop installation required - no screwing around with what build works on your particular OS.
/.-ers. (of course the disadvantage is no working offline)
4) IT maintenance - while not a big issue for most of us that post here, for all those mere mortals keeping the software up to date, or upgrading to a new version can be a major headache. With software as a service, its done for you.
5) Accessibility - what if you're outside the firewall and can't get thru the VPN? Again, a bigger deal for mere mortals that
6) less start up risk. If I can start with a couple of seats a month for $50/seat versus having to kick out hundreds or thousands of dollars per desktop copy, it's a better deal (well, legally anyways).
7) Generally the Software as a service providers have better backup/recovery processes than the average SMB (think law firm, not software house).
There's lots more reasons of varying importance. I think the parent's point #1 is probably the most relevant of all tho.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
then it must surely be a good idea. That man ought to have the nickname "stopped clock."
SaaS offers manufacturers the ability to update every existing installation of their software.
Whether open source or closed source, once you find a bug, you have to assume the "bad guys" know as well.
At that point, you wonder about the guy who's on a fishing trip and has no idea his small business server can be randomly pwnt by a published exploit.
If a major blog software author found they had a crucial vulnerability in a software version shipped two version numbers ago, they would like to be able to update it before the bad guys found it.
That is what SaaS offers that desktop software doesn't. The exception is if a very simple runtime is created within a client environment, like a browser, which also makes the installations simpler and more uniform.
400 years of industrial history suggests that streamlining and creating uniformity increase reliability and profits.
Microsoft is wishing they had SaaS'd Windows in 1995, as all those creaky old machines running windows 98, 2000, and early versions of XP get pwnt by trojans run amuck.
Christopher Blanc, coder at larg
The push for "software as a service" is nothing more than a push for centralized timesharing. Except for a few situations (e.g. call centers), the advantages of a thick desktop far outweigh the negatives. The computer manufacturers were saddened when everyone switched from million dollar machines with extensive maintenance contracts that serviced a couple dozen users to desktop machines managed in-house.
Does anyone remember Sun's "The Network Is The Computer" thin client push? The thin clients ran like crap when the network ran like crap. The SunRay servers ran like crap pretty much all the time and they were EXPENSIVE!!! And thus rose the .sig, "The network is the network, the computer is the computer. Sorry for the confusion. --Sun MicroSystems"
There wasn't an upside there, either.
My take on purchased goods versus SaaS is;
Trust you data only unto yourself. Learn to understand and care for your tools. Don't be a dumb-ass like the millions of other point-and-drool morons connected to the 'net. Be responsible for your own little corner of the datasphere. Be a good neighbor. Watch over those around you who need your guidance on the 'net. Fight spam and viruses; you're either part of the problem or part of the solution. Remember, their life-time warranty is referencing THEIR lifetime, not yours. Don't trust subscription services of any kind; one minute they're there, the next they're gone.
Or is the above just too hard for most people? Or does is cut into your precious EverCrack time? Or is is just EASIER to let someone else do it for you so you can complain about it later?
Bloody, apathetic planet. I've no sympathy for them at all. -- Prostetnic Vogon Geltz
If you're centralized, decentralize. If you're decentralized, centralize.
But seriously -- I'm not fond of SaaS without the infrastructure to support it. SalesForce is supposedly to support road warriors, but without offline access, and without broadband wireless cards, it's pretty much useless (and a real annoyance if you're dealing with people who calendar in a desktop app, and not your SalesForce calendar).
However, TCO should be lower for many SaaS implementations: the client company doesn't need to keep servers running, including the staff to support them. Software updates are basically free... and the big thing is that it's an EXPENSE versus a CAPITAL EXPENDITURE. Software as capital is silly, since it doesn't depreciate or appreciate in value like real property, but many companies have to deal with that in their financial environment when it crosses a certain price threshold.
The only thing you need is a fat, reliable pipe on both ends, and the system should be pretty darn useful. We're hosting with VPN in the middle, so DOS attacks and such should be unlikely.
Design for Use, not Construction!
FTFA: "There should be no way that a legitimate user of a product should be suddenly cut off from use of that product because of an authentication server error, ever. ... All this proves is that these Web-based applications cannot be trusted."
WGA does not fit into the same category as Google and Amazon.com (or even good old /.!). Some software is best provided as a service, and it's worth trusting for the value it provides. That sort of software derives most of its value from the fact that it is connected to information that its customers want.
Now, WGA on the other hand isn't worth trusting. As a service, it doesn't enable any valuable functionality; all it can do is disable existing functionality. It relies on locally running code to do its work, anyway, which is why this "service" doesn't even work on Linux, Mac, or early versions of Windows. (Can you imagine implementing a WGA client for Linux?)
Maybe a better conclusion would be that some software does more harm than good when it's implemented as a service, or just when it's implemented at all.
John Dvorak is just plain stupid?
The different issues of one versus many are a never ending thing. But when you break it down to the BIG ones... Maintaining one set of data, the security involved, backups, redundancy, configuration management, change management and on and on. There is no question about it. Centralized is it.
Just the security is huge. If I have an online store and you wish to purchase something from me - you need to download my shopping cart software and install it? So instead of protecting 1, I am protecting everyone? Not a good idea. What happens when it needs updates, or when it crashes your computer or etc.
And I don't think that performance is really an issue anymore either. A centralized app is as fast as the pipe it is traveling on. There are some things to be said for good coding etc... But if you have a slow pipe - you have a slow app. I haven't really seen this lately. I think everyone is on DSL, cable modem or wireless access. And we really don't use all of the bandwidth. Most web apps are pretty fast.
But besides all of that: The M$ outage was absolutely uncalled for. There is NO need to have an outage of a system that large for that long. We have CONOPS plans for a reason. And if these backup plans don't work - someone should be fired for not doing their job. There is WAY too much technology out there to prevent these kinds of things from happening.
Heck M$ sells some of it. They should try and use it.
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
Look at how many people were without phone service when Skype wen't down. Some were smart and either had a land line as a back-up to Skype or vice versa, but by creating a single central point of failure, thousands of businesses were inconvenienced and lost money.
Software as a Service (SaaS) creates all sorts of ripe opportunities for hackers, crackers, and other cyber criminals. It's been a cottage industry to blackmail online casinos, threatening DDOS attacks if you're not paid off. Since a half-day DDOS could cost the casino in the high five figures (or more), they pay the blackmail.
What if a large SaaS company had a 100,000 business customers... just 100,000? That's a ripe DDOS blackmail target if I ever saw one. And if you could hack the systems and gain access to the tax and banking spreadsheets of 100,000 clients? Can you say "low-hanging fruit" boys and girls? I knew you could.
And what if the company is being run by idiots who fake their numbers to make it seem like a sinking ship is just "settling in the water" until the ship suddenly capsizes without warning, going belly-up in the space of hours. All your docs and spreadsheets are offline... indefinitely. And if by some graceful foresight, you backed up your docs, if you can't find a piece of software that can both run locally and work with the proprietary formats the SaaS vendor used for their docs, you're still SOL.
Those are worst case scenarios, but you get the drift.
Start a happiness pandemic
Does anyone think these apps are going back to the desktop?
They're going back to my laptop as soon as I can manage it. A week ago last Friday I lost my internet link for the weekend, and was cut off from the software I was working on, from Google, from Wikipedia... and as soon as I got back online I started working on using the Wikipedia download (only 2.9 gigabytes compressed) to make that last less important.
Local storage is growing so fast that keeping local caches of even huge online databases is reasonable.
But the flipside of this is more important.
Wikipedia can be easily cached locally. Google Maps can't. And there's two inferences to be drawn from this.
First... if the software itself requires online access, everything changes. It's not that WGA is designed to stop you from doing something or not that made it a problem, it's that it makes certain functionality useless without that online access.
Second... Google Reader and Google Maps are occasionally-important nice-to-have capabilities. They're not critical. If they were offline for a couple of days people would gripe, but you wouldn't be locked out of your job and data. WGA is something that perhaps shouldn't be necessary, but it is necessary, and that makes an outage important.
Putting this together should teach us that having critical functions "in the cloud" (as Microsoft puts it) is dangerous. What if your word processor or operating system itself was "in the cloud"? At the very least you'd need far greater reliability from the servers and the infrastructure of the internet itself no matter why it was there.
THAT is the lesson that has to be learned. Not that online services are a failed model, but that they're a bad model for anything that really matters.
Now, WGA on the other hand isn't worth trusting. As a service, it doesn't enable any valuable functionality; all it can do is disable existing functionality.
That's not the real issue.
Let's say you had a Google Maps database on your computer, but it had to get to Google Maps online to work. If it didn't work, you'd be stuck. You'd have to use something else to plan your trip, you'd have to call directory assistance or ask someone. It might take you an extra 10 minutes to find out something you needed to know. Just like you would be if you didn't have internet access to Google Maps. It's not a big deal, because Google Maps isn't critical.
On the other hand, if your word processor or operating systems was in an online service, the way Microsoft wants it to be, you'd be just as stuck as you are with WGA down. And it's a big deal, because you've lost access to your data. Why does it matter whether you're stuck because WGA is down, or because the server with your data is on is down?
It doesn't.
The issue isn't "WGA is there to disable the OS", it's "the OS is too important to depend on online services".
THAT is what Dvorak is saying.
And today, that's true.
But more on that in another message.
You don't have to use servers running 24/7 to provide a customer with a service. That's just how the less creative business marketing people think because they are unwilling to take personal risks.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If you're judging SaaS by the performance of M$ or if your opinions are driven by sensational media coverage and highly visible outages like Skype then you're incapable of sound judgment.
There have been constant small and spectacular meltdowns by IS shops all over the planet but they don't get noticed by the press. I'd much rather trust my stuff to the grid and the "Googleplex" than the average IT shop. It's like more people are killed by lightning than by tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes but the most attention goes to the latest big disaster.
The collective stability of the net/grid and Google's 500,000+ servers are going to bring irresistible disruptive change. Those who do not adjust to this trend will become extinct relics. Why buy a CD when you can just tap the grid for an MP3? Why make a trip to the store to get a DVD when you can just download it from the net in seconds? Why go to the movie theatre when you can just watch it on your own home theatre which has better quality video and audio? Why bother with installing and constantly upgrading software when you can just use it on the Net? Why worry about backups when Google makes it routine and does it for you so you don't even have to think about it? It's appalling that so many people lack vision and are blinded by the here and now.
My daughter is kind of a space cadet and is rarely bothered by small details like backing up her files containing her thesis. I'm more comfortable with Google storage than her laptop file "management."
There is NO need to have an outage of a system that large for that long. We have CONOPS plans for a reason. And if these backup plans don't work - someone should be fired for not doing their job. There is WAY too much technology out there to prevent these kinds of things from happening.
Maybe, but right now nobody's got reliable enough internet access to justify having anything critical ONLY available online, as a service, even if you're right. A week ago I lost internet access for three days because of a cut cable. That was a major problem for me because I had some files I was working on on a server... and redundantly on another server... and periodically downloaded... but the download was out of date and I couldn't get to either server.
I think everyone is on DSL, cable modem or wireless access.
Nope. Even in a city like Houston there are gaps in the coverage, and only a fraction of the population are connected where coverage exists. Cable probably has the biggest coverage in this town and in my neighborhood cable Internet is not getting to even 10% of the households.
So... if you think we're ready to go back to the future of Shockwave Rider where local applications are rare and everything is "in the cloud", and roll back the personal computer revolution, you have to prove it's safe. How are these stumbling blocks going to be fixed?
We'll have both, need both, but will still have a lot of cases where people try to the wrong one and get burnt.
Tell me more of this intriguing "kill switch" service that will separate me from the data on my desktop if ever the network should fail. This is the kind of innovation I eXPect will fill future Vistas. It's like the worst of all worlds! Get a patent quick so that those free software communists can never be compatible with it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Why buy a CD when you can just tap the grid for an MP3?
:)
.MAC or whatever. Backups are well suited to SaaS because even days of latency aren't important unless you have *simultaneous* local and network failures.
:)
From the point of software-as-a-service these are the same thing. They both end up with the software, the music, in your hands or your computer, independent of the grid. I had all my music on hand a week ago when I didn't have access to my database servers I needed to use to test the code I was working on.... because the latter really WAS like SaaS. I'd have been happier were it the other way around.
My daughter is kind of a space cadet and is rarely bothered by small details like backing up her files containing her thesis.
So set it up so it's always backed up to Google or
But when your net goes down the weekend before her thesis is due, having the applications and files locally will make her a lot happier than the assurance that you know where a good Internet cafe is.
Isnt the Skype outage a good example of shortcomings of SaaS?
Im not totaly for or against it, it all depends on what you want to do. Some things are better kept in house. How many of us have 3rd party hosted email and websites? SaaS isnt all bad, but I wouldnt feel comortable hosting out my LOB apps.
everybody got networked and we were back to a more central-controllable system. Because there are advantages and disadvantages of each model, things will keep going back and forth as people react to the issues of the currently-dominant model, whichever one it is.
Only a coercive monopoly could force a "service" like WGA that degrades desktop performance when there's a network or server problem that has nothing to do with your data. Locking up your data from a server outside your control is an innovation no one wants. It does not matter if your data is actually stored outside your control or in some kind of "bitlocker" on your desk, the result is the same.
How this kind of anti-service could be twisted into Google FUD is beyond me, but that's what the summary and Dvorak have managed to do. You can store your Google stuff locally in standard file formats like ODF. Loss of network access is temporary and does nothing bad to your local data. Any company that tries stunts like WGA is going to get burnt, and that includes M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In this instance, you'd start with server-based online applications, and then suddenly a new technology--the desktop computer with a quad-core processor and huge hard drive--appears. Now, you do not need to do all your computing online. The timeline is reversed.
But that's what happened! That's the timeline we're on! You started with server based online applications. When I met my wife (online, mind you) I didn't have a computer... I had a good (for the time) terminal and a fast (for the time) modem, and I could dial in to my office and work from home. She had an Atari, with low quality graphics and worse quality text and so slow that even when I got a compiler for it it wasn't even worth using... and my online experience was way better than hers.
But when the phone went out after a hurricane, she still had her software. I was dead in the water.
It was really only a couple of decades ago that we went from online computing with dumb terminals to personal computers that could pick up the load from minis and mainframes and supermicros. He's wrong about the timeline... Microsoft's "cloud" is *reversing* the timeline, it's maybe the most recent attempt to pull computing back into the 'dinosaur pen'.
He's right about why this is a bad idea, though. Those of us who still have long term memory that goes back to before the microcomputer revolution have to agree with him on that. Most of us, anyway... there's always been a solid core of dinosaur herders who don't like the freedom we have now...
I'm involved in the engine room of a fairly large SaaS vendor. For a certain class of applications, it makes sense. For something like WGA, that had no customer upside anyway, it's a bit - well - where's the service? The only possible actions it can perform are "keep computer up" or "take computer down". How sweet is that?!?!? Um ... not.
About general reliability of SaaS - the problems in SaaS happen everywhere regardless of them being in-house or not, and if you're a large multi-office corporation, you WILL use some portion of your apps remotely in any event. Our reliability runs to 99.999% uptime over the last three months, and 99.993% uptime year-to-date, on what I'd call modest but not insignificant throughput of 500 million page turns a month. I have servers that have been chugging for 700 days. If it fails - so what? Its failover partner will pickup. I can lose half my infrastructure without affecting availability at all.
SaaS is no different than any other type of enterprise app - if you spend enough money in the right places, you can make it pretty reliable. More reliable than your desktop. More reliable than your single exchange server, certainly. Speed is a legit issue that is largely a by-product of distance to the datacenter and working within the sometimes unnatural constraints of client web-based technology - for pure interactivity, you can do no better than a good desktop app. For a large class of apps, though, SaaS makes sense.
sloth jr
that's why steve^2 made pc - so you could have one
without depending on the big guy.
microsoft wants to be de big guy -- but when de main breaks down,
all de dumb terminals go down.
open source kills de wiked witch, and all the monkees go free.
Allowing someone else to control all of your information has always been a foolish decision.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Well obviously SaaS has not fully arrived but the point is that while living in the present we need to have a vision for the future. Regarding SaaS vs. the soon-to-be-obsolete way of delivering software, the future should be quite obvious as the handwriting is on the wall. Even as we speak, Apple is making billions on iTunes and music stores selling CD's are going out of business. Get with the Jetsons or you'll be a dinosaur.
Maybe it was intentional? It happened on a Friday night, after businesses were closed. Convenient, very convenient.
;-)
1. Gage the pain of the customers, record a datapoint.
2. Announce it won't be fixed until Monday, record a pain datapoint.
3. Fix it by Saturday, record a datapoint.
4. Watch the media and blogs for a few days, record final datapoints.
5. Extrapolate the equivalent "during business hours" customer pain level
6. Determine the risk/advantage ratio of WGA, lay out future product plans accordingly.
Maybe that's why MS has been so silent (so far) on this outage - they didn't want to pollute their data gathering efforts with media influence.
I didn't notice any other conspiracy theories in this thread, so I thought I'd better whip one up post haste
New Music!
So what specific online applications are we talking about here?
FTA:
Windows Genuine Advantage
Google Apps
(please list others)
> The SunRay servers ran like crap pretty much all the time and they were EXPENSIVE!!!
Sorry you couldn't hack it and/or got bad support. Other sites with sunrays work just fine. Maybe you cheaped out on the hardware -- it's not supposed to be any cheaper than desktops, it's just that desktop support is no longer a cost factor.
And sunrays are dumb terminals but otherwise have nothing to do with SAAS -- everything they run is very much "installed" on the server.
> Or is is just EASIER to let someone else do it for you so you can complain about it later?
That's the business model of pretty much all trade, yes. Make your own clothes, do you?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Even as we speak, Apple is making billions on iTunes and music stores selling CD's are going out of business.
You're right, Apple is selling billions of songs through iTunes. You're wrong about what this means, though: Apple is *selling* billions of songs, and they're totally clobbering the music stores that are using the subscription model.
The MP3 you buy from iTunes isn't anything like "software as a service". The music you listen to online on Rhapsody is where your "software as a service" model is working. Or, really, not working.
I guess you're too young to remember when "software as a service" was king of the hill.
Back in the '70s and early '80s microcomputers were still basically toys, computers most people could afford were a fraction of the power of mainframes and minicomputers. It took years before basic word processing, let alone more complex applications, were really practical. Server based online applications were cheap, and one of
the critical applications for any personal computer was a terminal program so you could get online and use them. People with real terminals sneered at the 40 column 16 line display of the Apples and Ataris.
The personal computer revolution clobbered "software as a service".
The Jetsons are the vision of the future from that era. George doesn't telecommute, he commutes. George isn't doing anything at Spacely Sprockets he couldn't be doing at home. George is the pre-cyberpunk future of flying cars and skyway traffic jams. We're past that now, and all the wishing for the safe old days of the IBM 360 in its dinosaur pen won't bring it back.
No, "software as a service" isn't the future. It's a 20 year dead corpse that Microsoft is trying to reanimate.
In my view, the problem is more general than the issues surrounding software-as-a-service. In my experience, there is a distinct lack of concern for quality. Everyone involved, the engineers, management, and even the consumers, seem more concerned with getting something done than getting it done right. I can't tell you how many times I've been ridiculed and accused of "making mountains out of molehills" just because I took a few minutes to consider risks and failure modes. I've been accused of impeding progress simply because I refused to put untested code into a live, 24/7 production system. Many people just don't want to give any more time to something than absolutely necessary, even when they have direct evidence showing them how stupid they're being.
I had this one project where, after years of me begging for approval to fix known and very serious bugs, after countless crashes and losses of data, after huge six-figure billing errors, and after tens of thousands of dollars of fees and other penalties, management still refused to acknowledge anything was broken. I had another project where one of the team-leads ran out of logical arguments to support their case and begin ranting about how they were a millionaire.
This is not to say that nobody cares about quality. I've met quite a few who do. However, they are by far the exception and not the rule. The average person would rather have a box of crap than nothing at all. Until that attitude changes, nothing is going to improve. So long as people are accepting of inferiority, there is little incentive to offer them anything better.
Well we are talking about things like: Ubuntu + Google docs/mail vs Vista + Exchange + Office, Right? So... $0 vs $700ish seems pretty close to the ballpark. And that doesn't even include a per-user slice of server costs for maintaining proper email, sharing, backups and remoting capabilities.
even the blind squirrel finds a nut.
I think you have slashdot confused with alt.sex.stories.coprophilia
What software are you talking about that replaces $1000+ apps with online apps?
Compare a CRM system from Salesforce.com versus on-premise Seibel for example. Big big difference in price.
if you are talking about inhouse, intra-net apps, for security reasons, the only way you should be able to access it from outside the network is through VPN
Again, think about a CRM app. Do you want your top sales guy or exec to have to mess with getting through the VPN from his home computer? Or futzing around with some hotel's internet connection? Or from Starbucks? etc etc etc.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
There are some things that work well as a server side application, and there are other things that work better on the client side.
If you need multiple people to access the same data, or you need to be able to access the data remotely - then software as a service is a good choice (and you can own the servers yourself - serving yourself, as it were - if you are concerned about your data being in other's hands. Of course you'll need to manage the system yourself then).
If you need stability and performance - then client side applications fit the bill (you will need to manage upgrades, backups and data syncronization as required).
If you need absolute security - then don't put it on the network at all.
Risk is involved in all of those decisions - balancing it out to get the right mix is your best bet.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Software services are likely to be much MUCH more reliably than home machines in terms of uptime and data loss. How many people even have their data regularly backed up, much less on an array? Software services are scary because you can't control the risk/cost portion of the equation, but given that most people don't even think about it, it will be a win for most people.
What if the timeline were reversed, and we were moving from online apps to the desktop. ... 'You can image the advertising push. "Now control your own data!" "Faster processing power now." "Cheaper!" "Everything at your fingertips." "No need to worry about network outages. ..."
I you look back to the early days of "minicomputers" and "desktop computers" around 1980, you'll see a lot of exactly the sort of arguments like the above. What was happening all over was that users of central time-shared "mainframe" computers were using whatever departmental funds they could to buy their own small computers, so they could abandon the central mainframes. The DP people were horrified, of course, and argued that the central machine provided much more cost-effective processing than a comparable flock of all those little machine, and the little ones could hardly communicate with each other.
But the users were fighting frustration at the difficulty of getting anything done on a big machine controlled by a different department. Their argument was that with their own small machine, they could install the software that they needed, without getting the approval of the bean counters, and the little machine would do what was needed when it was needed, not at the whims of the DP people. Yes, the little machine would eventually cost more, but they would answer to their users' needs, not to a remote disinterested bureaucracy's needs.
The current argument for central servers is really just a replay of this. And it'll mostly fail for the same reasons. A big central server will be controlled by a bureaucracy that has its own motives and needs, and won't be responsive to the lowly users' needs. Smart users will find ways of going around this and using a local machine for the things that the server just can't be made to do right. Management decrees won't work any better than they did with mainframes, because pressure to get your job done will always override pressure to hand your job over to the mercies of the remote central bureaucracy.
Here and there, a few DP (or IT or ??) departments will do a good job and really support their users. They will be used as evidence "proving" how good a central server can be. But most central servers won't be run by such departments, so most users will resist such centralization whenever they can.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
John C. Dvorak is a Luddite. Lately, every technology that's been new he's lambasted it or acted like he doesn't get it. *cough* *cough* Mac OS X *cough* *cough*. Only to come back and double talk his position back to acceptance. It's like he's in a constant 12 step program because M$ doesn't rule this industry with an iron fist anymore.
...
Step 1: "Ah it will never work."
Step 2: "Why won't doesn't this work?"
Step 3: "What they made it work! How dare them!"
Step 10: "I guess it's ok"
Step 11: "It's pretty good"
Step 12: "I love this thing."
He's the computer industry equivalent of the old men at the muppets. Granted those guys are funny.
While not quite of the form that MS want to force upon us (just take an enforced subscription of $150 a year for office - saves even having to bother doing any coding) I do have the experience of using software, for licensing reasons, that is held on a server and we run the copy remotely across multiple users.
The experience - far from perfect, sporadic problems, slow (compared to local execution) and a dangerous reliance singular structure. If the central copy goes down (which it has done 3 or 4 times for 6+ hours in the past year) then it is shut up shop at work. Myself and a few colleagues who rely on it basically can do nothing - and indeed on a couple of occasions we have knocked off and gone home at 2pm because there is basically zilch for us to do.
Whether a local service structure or an internet wide distribution structure - a reliance on that setup is risky - and while there are arguments about advantages (above and beyond the nefarious reasons MS want it) of all my software I have installed (what, 20-50 installed programs) none of them require daily/monthly patching or anything that remote supply can do better. In terms of patching and security the OS is the one that requires it most. How many of us desperately need to "patch" winrar once a month? (or frankly even office).
The difference be is how well the online apps are managed. Just as a desktop computer can be a heap of crap if used with bad software/hardware an online app can suck just as much. Microsoft should not be seen as some kind of measuring stick considering their longstanding disregard for reliability and stability. If they havent given a crap about stability on the desktop why would they do it for their servers? I think google is a prime example of just how well online apps can work. If done right they can work much better than their desktop equivalents. Online apps could drive down operating systems to where they should be, invisible, down there managing hardware and not sitting in the way of the apps and screaming for attention.
HTTP/1.1 400
It's really quite ingenious - in fact, I assume that you're merely a copy, licensed under the GPL with all the frothing source code intact!
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
My app and data on my laptop:
Hey, why won't the hard drive spin? Damn.
Come back here thief, help!
Was my backup cd in the house too? Oh no,
there goes my Great American Novel.
What do you mean I need a new computer to run this next version?
I just bought this one last year.
But seriously, the problems of SAAS are teething troubles.
The following technologies will improve:
1. Local client-side caching for performance
2. Software that executes the appropriate parts in a
sandboxed client-side applet for performance (what a
novel idea!)
3. Server data migration for performance wherever you are
using it in the world.
4. Massively redundant widely distributed strong-encrypted data storage.
You just can't compete with all that.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
It's almost like he intentionally trolls his readership by stating the most outrageous possible point of view
/. readers are at an age or experience lever where they consider anything before Win95 ro be pre-historic). I've actually seen some of the marketing material, magazine articles, etc. from the early days of computing--when it was the "eighters vs. the sixers" (referring to the Altair/IMSAI/ProcTech/Other-S100-bus vs. TRS80/PET/AppleII religious wars). Much of what Dvorak mentions were the reasons/hype that made those early machines so appealing. No longer did you have to worry about the lines being busy, expensive CPU cycles on timeshare systems, power-tripping sysadmins--you had your very own system with total control--you could keep your own data on your own tapes or discs, etc.
Dvorak can say some off-the-wall stuff sometimes, but DUH, that's his raison d'etre is it not? How many people REALLY read a columnist and think "you know, this guys has some really conventional, mainline opinions and backs them yup with 100 percent logic and technical specs...how wonderfully boring--I think I'll read all his articles!"
But you know what? Sometimes Dvorak really does call it. Remember his "outrageous" prediction that Apple will get tired of the challenges it faced with its powerPC architecture and would switch to Intel? What CPUs do all the latest Macs now? Dvorak was dismissed as a kook, even though the possibility was very plausible because the first development builds of MacOS X were on the Intel platform and it was only ported to PowerPC later.
The same thing applies here--Dvorak gives a somewhat kooky, contrarian opinion on "software as a service" and a number of people get upset or laugh out loud, but give it some thought--is his "reverse timeline" scenario all that silly? It sounds quite sensible to me, since that is nearly exactly what the scenario was in the 1970s (it seems far too many
Seems to me tht "software as a service" as being pushed by the bigwigs like Microsoft is almost a regression to the days of the timeshare-and-dumb-terminal days--works great in some situations, at a certain scope (such as a corporate environment), but PERSONAL computers, used in the home for PERSONAL tasks are stil popular because they offer PERSONAL control. People are going to be (and should be) very wary about giving up ther own storage space, their own computing resources and control over their computing experience.
This doesn't mean I'm against web-based technology or service-oriented architecture, because in fact when used in the right way it has the potential to revolutionise the computing experience. Think about how people are interacting using Facebook and MySpace and so forth--grat concept but it is flawed in that it is still too centralised, with the potential of central control and central point of failure. This technology could be used to create a more DISTRIBUTED architecture, where many residences are equipped with their own servers, controlled by those who live there rather than a central company/gov't/organisation.
Of course, there isn't money in it for the AT&T's, Microsoft's and so forth, and thus far "personal servers" are not to the point where they are easily maintained by consumers. However it would certainly be great if that could ever happen. I know from having my own servers in my nome to handle my email, personal website, firewalls, file archives, etc. that it can be VERY nice to have control over my internet service (I can control how spam asassin filters out junk at the server, attachment limitations, DNS entires/config, databases, etc.) If I run out of space I get another drive--If someone uses up their space at MS or Google or Yahoo, tough sh!t, delete it or pay up for more--and pay again and again every month to keep that space, not just once for new hardware.
... and so am I, and even we're not online 24/7/365. Let's answer your question...
And short of having a cable cut (which can happen) how often does your internet connection (not the router) go down?
Every time I leave my house, until I get to the office. Every time I leave the office until I return. Every time I go shopping. Every time I go on vacation, even though for the past 15 years I've made sure I had service lined up at my destination.
A few years ago, we had a bad amplifier in the neighborhood. Internet service went down every afternoon, during the summer, until that was found and fixed.
All I am saying is that central is a better overall solution for critical systems.
Whether central or local is a better model depends on what the system is. If the system requires online access to be meaningful, like that straw man credit card authentication for onine sales, of course there's no problem making it as centralized as the product you're buying. But unless it *has* to be centralized, why create an unnecessary dependency on a network?
Because that's what WGA is, and what Google Apps are, and what Microsoft's theoretical "cloud" is... an unnecessary dependency on an online service that doesn't benefit anyone but the central authority itself.
If every apps was PC based, most people would not be safe...
Applications are PC based. Services are network based. That's the difference that's developed between applications and services. This story and this discussion are not about turning services into applications, it's about turning applications into services.
We are almost ready to try it :(
:(
:/
Our medicare billing program sucks as do most of the packages. You still end up paying ongoing 'license' fees to keep it turned on.
An online one is looking like a possibly. They get to hold your data hostage, etc.
However...
It seems to be one of the only packages that has everything up to date and works with all 3 states we need. SAS seems ok if there are a zillion things that need to stay updated on a regular basis. If we cant use part then they won't get paid for that part. Current package have to argue to get partial refund etc
Upfront cost,up to 5 figures for 10 people + monthly maint fees
vs
Per-Page fees
My best guess is that it is too close to call cost-wise.
It shouldn't take an article like this for people to appreciate the downsides of web apps. The IT industry has already been through an era when apps were centralized, and moved away from it.
I think that the current infatuation with "Web 2.0" is similar to a market panic or mania. For whatever reason, the web as an operating system has become the darling of the press, and the herd are following it. Like a market mania, the bubble will eventually burst, and people will suddenly see distributed apps in the cold light of day. Until then, "everybody's doing it" will rule the roost.
I don't have a problem with distributed applications, but current browsers aren't the ideal host for them.
Hey, why won't the hard drive spin? Damn.
That's what backups are for.
Come back here thief, help!
And nobody can hijack your online data?
Was my backup cd in the house too? Oh no, there goes my Great American Novel.
Yeh, I know people who this happened to. Me, for one. But you can do something about that, and some of the data I've lost has been offline. I've lost the Apple II font editor that was stolen with my backpack, sure, but nobody has a copy of the Star Trek game that I wrote that was included with one of the early Berkeley Software Distributions (yes, I've even asked McKusick... it's gone). Nowadays, I have backups online and in multiple places offline, and the only data I've lost in the past 20 years has been stuff that I hadn't brought offline yet.
Online services are out of my control. I can't do anything about them.
Local data, you can lose, if you're careless. But you can choose not to be careless.
Massively redundant widely distributed strong-encrypted data storage.
Build it. See if they come. But that's not what's on the table today. You want to change people's perceptions of the old online services world, bring it back, turn back the personal computer revolution, you gotta prove it. You can't keep them down on the server farm now they've seen the big city.
Software installations need to be administrated. If this is easy, then the average user can do this himself/herself. If it is harder, there are three options: LOcal administration by local user (may require aquiration of competence), remote administration of locally installed software (works not to well, MS does this at the moment) or local administration with remote usage. The last one is software as a service. It means the user or administrator at the siter of the usage looses mots/all rights and data can be freely accessed by the software service operator. Also they completely control data formats and the like, can lcok you in and then impart arbitrarily high fees on you, while lowering service quality to an arbir=trarily low level.
If your IT is mission critical, software as a service may kill you, but it will certainly starve you after a while. Stay away from it. Either have somebody else maintain your IT (and move to some other maintainer if they try to screw you) or have a local administrator, that bebefits from your enterprise doing well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
3) No desktop installation required - no screwing around with what build works on your particular OS.
If we're talking about SAS as an alternative to shrink-wrap software, then we're talking mostly about MS Windows since there isn't much shrink-wrap software for Linux/Unix and Mac is a very small market in comparison. So, when we're just talking Windows, and we're willing to limit the discussion to currently supported Windows systems, then producing reliable and correct installers is just not the problem people make it out to be.
- T
Actually, MMOs were for a long time the buggiest games released. The idea that you have a permanent way of upgrading everyone's programs for ever, dropped quality to abysmal lows.
Thing is, with a normal program or game, you don't know how many people have applied the latest patch, and you can get bitten in the ass by reports of people getting virused by opening a file in an unpatched Word '97. With online service-type apps and MMOs, you know that they can't even connect without getting the latest version.
The psychological effect is quite reversed: it gives you the assurance that you _can_ patch it reliably anytime you wish. So basically, "it compiles, let's ship it" just became a lot more viable a choice. And the resulting quality showed it. Read the review of Anarchy Online for example on Something Awful someday, and know this: they actually barely scratch the surface of how bad it was. As an early subscriber I can confirm every single bug they mention there, and a lot more they never discovered.
And the funny thing is, that ability to patch didn't work better in the long run either, for most MMOs. The patches were released just as half-arsed and untested as the initial release, and most games bounced through years of patches that introduced two new bugs for each bug fixed. I've been on games where more than one patch got rolled back within hours of its release, because it had catastrophic effects.
We've already seen a similar effect before, in PC vs Console gaming. The easier it is to patch after release, the less incentive to get it right the first time. What should have been a major PC advantage, the ability to patch, actually worked as a disadvantage. Games released for the PC only recently started getting any serious QA, because the knowledge was there that, eh, you can always patch it later or blame it on the user's hardware anyway. (And if you think I'm exaggerating about how low it could go, I can think of one PC game I bought which would throw a script _syntax_ error if you tried to get past the main menu.)
Mind you, I'm not saying necessarily Microsoft will be as bad with their online office version. (But then again, there's nothing to say they necessarily won't either.) But some other people? Heh.
That's assuming that sales only happen in the first week after release. This is one thing especially game fanboys don't seem to understand: patches aren't provided for free, and purely out of kindness, they're provided to ensure continued sales (though not necessarily of the same product) and continued customer goodwill. In end effect, they _are_ paid for those patches, by the fact that people continue to buy their stuff.
That goes double for stuff like Windows or MS Office. Those aren't products that get sold for two weeks and then go to the bargain bin. There's a continuous revenue stream from people keeping buying them, individually or together with their brand new computer, for years after release. If you just let your product have year-old security holes, people just stop buying it. Having an image of someone who takes problems seriously and will fix them in a timely fashion, isn't kindness, it's needed to keep making money.
(Again, I'm not saying whether MS is any good at it or not. Just that that's an image they struggle hard to maintain. Whether it's actually true or not, well, I'm not going to discuss that today. Make your own decision there.)
So basically IMHO that incentive isn't any different from a shrink-wrapped produc
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The IT industry has already been through an era when apps were centralized, and moved away from it.
You remember that. I remember that. To judge from the messages here, a lot of people can't even *imagine* what it was like.
Let's look at one of the options that hasn't gotten much press, and frankly isn't considered to be very good, Office Live.
:)
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft but this service (intially, until they have a lot of people signed up then they can tighten the screws) could save a small business a lot of money. For $40 a month you get a domain name, tools for building a site, 20GB of bandwidth a month, 2GB of storage space for your website, 50 email addresses with 2GB of storage a piece as well as some basic business apps, contact management, project management etc.
And zero servers to maintain, backup, or purchase.
For a small business that is HUGE.
If the business takes off they will out grow it, but if it doesn't it won't take years to pay off the loans they took out to buy hardware.
In house hardware and software is definitely a valuable asset for a lot of companies, but for someone running a mail order doll furniture business, software as a service might be just the ticket (though they might want to look at the free level of Office Live).
Actually I encourage everyone to make Microsoft pay for a free domain for a year by using the Office Live Basic service
Insert pithy comment here.
BTW, this is the same phenomenon which caused the centralisation of textile manufacturing in large mills. Fast transport made it possible to do it all in one place and power made it possible to churn the stuff out. Today, the transport is network bandwidth and the power is cheap CPU.
Deleted
There could a case for Software as a Service kind of application. Shameless Plug: Krawler (you can google).
It has all what you need from a SaaS app - and it sits on your desktop so you can have access anytime, even offline. It works on standard http/80 - just like a browser would - but being a native app, it can tightly integrate with your desktop.
Just a thought...
For a certain class of applications, it makes sense.
This is the bottom line.
For some applications, it makes sense.
For some applications, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
Would it matter whether WGA was what it was, or Microsoft's idea of a "cloud" operating system, or a "thin client" server for some super-web-tv product or for Sun's Javastation, or Google Apps (or Microsoft's inevitable response to them)?
The thing is, some applications are inherently collaborative and online, if the server's down you're dead in the water anyway. Some applications don't need to be online to be useful. Google, Wikipedia, online stores, webmail, these are well suited to the service model. Editors, operating systems, things that you use by yourself, you're creating an unnecessary risk when you take them online.
What Dvorak's talking about are the latter.
That was not software as a service, that was a lock in to proprietary platforms with lip service given to your needs.
The open systems movement, that grew into the open source movement, was built on online services, timesharing systems, that were not locked in to proprietary platforms. They were still centralized. You were still dependent on some computer outside your control to be up, on phone lines and networks outside your control to be working.
I've worked on VAX/VMS and the HP3000 servers running MPE.
I've worked on Version 6 UNIX and RSX-11/M and Version 7 UNIX and VAX/VMS and Xenix and MPE-IV and Ultrix and OS/1100 and TNIX and MS-DOS and Cromix and MP/M and Solaris and AmigaDOS and System V and Windows and BSD and BeOS and Linux and Mac OS and OS X and Regulus and GCOS and RT/11 and DR/DOS and RTE. There's two completely separate coordinate systems here.
Proprietary systems and application lock-in happen on timeshared systems and on personal computers. They are a problem whether your data is locked up in a hard disk you don't have access to or in a format for an application that isn't made any more. I've been in both places.
Centralized control can come out of open systems and proprietary ones. It's a problem whether your data locked up in the glass house is an a UNIX text file or an RMS variant record file.
But better to be dependent on access to the entire universe than to be limited by whatever is on my small desktop village.
Better not to be dependent on either. My small desktop village has access to the entire universe, but isn't dependent on it.
The fact that George Jetson still had to commute was a failure of the work culture, not the technology.
Software as a service is culture, not technology.
"Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?"
I took both pills.
So you say. Native app, just like a browser, standards... it must be a portable open-source application.
Oh well. Just a different kind of lock-in.
(go ahead, talk to me about MONO. I need a laugh)
Dvorak might be a stopped clock, maybe he's only right by accident, but this time he really IS right.
I had some kind of breakdown today and felt the need to ramble on forever about this article (mostly in a negative tone, I admit).
I won't reproduce it all here, but if anyone is interested have a ball.
A short summary might be that I think Dvoraks slid off some kind of gloom-and-doom terror-warning world-ending internet-on-fire deep end.
Hear his prophecy of the marketing: 'You can image the advertising push. "Now control your own data!" "Faster processing power now." "Cheaper!" "Everything at your fingertips." "No need to worry about network outages." "Faster, cheaper, more reliable."
Actually, this is exactly what was said -- back in the early 1980s when people were moving off time sharing and onto PCs. "Software as a service" is just time sharing with a web interface.
On the contrary, installation will be required every time. If the source is down, you have no software and you cannot work.
Good IT departments test VERY carefully before allowing an upgraded or even bugfixed app loose in a large installed base. This is because every company will have core things that they do which are unique to them, and the software "upgrade" may break those tasks. This is a VERY common problem. What you have no is no control over those damage inflicting "upgrades." This is not a good thing. There's a very good reason software isn't just handed to people in shrink wrap with a laconic "hey, install this."
You are seriously saying that an app on some web server somewhere, over networks and hardware you and your company have no way to repair or control, is superior to software and data on your laptop in terms of accessibility? There is no way. Individual machines with local software are far more accessible and reliable; if one goes down, one employee loses functionality. If the web service or the pipe to it goes down, they all do.
Depends on the software. The question is, what business software is not available in a desktop version inexpensively or even free, but you can get as a service inexpensively on a web site? You can get office suites, bitmap graphics software, structured graphics software, accounting software and so forth for not very much money (or none) per seat. Moving from this state to paying a web site to provide it isn't necessarily a better deal, or safer. It *could* be, but it requires very expensive software to be replaced by the web service, and examples of this are actually pretty rare.
This isn't an advantage of a web service as compared to shrinkwrap software. Good backup is an entirely separate issue. Furthermore, the web service backing up one software item and it's data doesn't solve the issue that the rest of the computer needs to be backed up as well, and in that sense, this is no favor to the computer user. The correct answer is complete and regular backups of the user's machine.
Previous poster's points you refer to:
Shrinkwrap providers also have incentives. They'd lke to sell more; they'd like for the user to be enthusiastic both about the product, and about support. If they can't sell more, they go out of business. I know what I'm talking about here, I've been running a software company selling an application that was initially brought to market in 1992. It is complex, extremely feature loaded, fast and stable. These things are the result of an ongoing process driven by precisely these issues - it matters if you leave bugs in or don
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
See, the problem with that is you're assuming by 'software as a service' they mean 'software coded as a website'.
Personally, I think of 'software as a service' more as things like some antivirus software. You can easily get those for free, but you have to pay the subscription to keep getting virus definition updates. It's still installed locally, you're still responsible for maintenance, it's still installed locally...well, I'll grant you less startup risk, but it (and your data) is still installed locally.
In other words, only one of your points holds true for subscription model 'software as a service'.
I've seen a lot of Linux apps use this model actually. Things like Cedega.
FYI, if you wanted to try it out, the site requires IE6.
This is an excellent case for the indie mac developer's products. These are generally small easy to use apps that perform a single function very well, and run on the desktop. It also seems to be one of the few areas where a single developer can write a decent application and be able to make a decent profit. Compare this to individuals who try to profit from from some sketchy web app, with poor reliability and a terrible interface, hard to do. Let's face reality - the internet is a content medium - used to drive ad sales. Not a medium to support functionality. Ironically - Google the leader of online advertising, and the catalyst of this "contentization", "contentifying" effect is one of the few companies that offer decent web functionality.
Although it is tempting to think that externalizing infrastructure has advantages like a better infrastructure one can have, some other problems may appear. What happens if externalized company's infrastructure works smoothly but fails our data link to them? Externalizing we can have two points of failure instead of one.
VirtualWorldsHub.com - News, forums, resources
This is an issue that has ebbed and flowed for decades. The world swings back and forth from centralized systems (e.g. mainframe) to edge devices (PC's/phones) and now, somewhat, back toward centralized systems (Google etal) connecting to dumb clients on the edge (Web browsers etc.). The reality is the the best solution is a combination of powerful devices on the "edge" or in the corporate datacenter and Web-based services. Some of those Web-based services provided good utility in their own right - Google, Hotmail etc.. Others are Web-based services that enhance "edge" devices - spam filtering for email servers or mail clients, storage services for PC apps like Photoshop Elements etc. When I hear the mantra of Software as a Service (SaaS) from some quarters I think they're insane. Microsoft in this case has it right. They're talking about "Software + Services" - the best of both worlds where you have the appropriate combination of local software running on servers, PC, Phones, XBOX's etc and "cloud services."
The Big business for SaaS right now (as in: where the bucks are) is in the enterprise. Think ERP, CRM, light productivity (word processing, spreadsheets) and groupware. That can all be done in a browser (even cross-browser / cross-platform).
That saves the average SMB around $1000,= per Desktop per upgrade cycle.
Compare that to, say, $50,= perhaps per month per seat (plus the fact that an average SMB probably need less seats than desktops) and the step becomes easy.
That is without calculating the maintainance costs for those desktops (software wise: antivirus, spyware, service packs, BSODs, the lot).
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
"we think DRM sucks - we kicked it out"
"no more eye candy - we now focus on computing - we kicked out 3d desktops"
"animations on the internet were a pita - we destroyed flash, shockwave, silverlight etc."
"no more eye candy - we now focus on computing - we kicked out GUIs and now use shells"
"now you don't need top of the line hardware anymore, you can buy cheaper, hardware, that uses less energy"
"MS products suck. We now use unix-like systems - they're far better"
"we think Programming languages are blown up - we developed a language that uses only 1s and 0s"
"we think it's more cost- and energy efficient to build hardware that does one thing and nothing more (like a CPU)"
"we are sick of all this technical stuff - we decided to live closer to nature"
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
We did the "online software" thing -- back before PCs. It was called "time-sharing" on mainframes. It was OK since back then it was the only way for Joe Sixpack (OK, Joe Grad Student anyway) to have a chance at using an actual computer without resorting to submitting a stack of punch cards to the digirati priests in the computer room.
...but now, we have these wonderful things called PCs. They let you actually do the work locally, without relying on sending data across a network.
Someone please tell me again why they're advocating a return to 1960s-style computing? I don't get it.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
ASP/SAAS misses a huge issue for corporations - the difference between Operating Expenses & Capital Expenses. When I buy a server, a chunk of software & some professional services to implement it, I can capitalize the entire project - including my internal headcount that were devoted to the project. With an ASP or SAAS, the cost goes directly against my G&A operating expenses. The bottom line is whether the annual depreciation expense is greater or less than the ASP/SAAS annual cost. Since in many organizations the Capital budgeting is essentially separate from the G&A budgeting, and depreciation is often not included in the "real" operating expenses for IT, you often get much less push back from the CFO when you propose a Capital project. Put a big monthly expense in your G&A budget for an ASP or SAAS, and they will question it every year.
I think that software as a service, with a local server running the software but having everything additionally backed up to a remote main server is the way to go.
Where I think we are headed is a $200 21 inch wide screen LCD monitor with a built in CPU that you hook to your phone hand set, keyboard and mouse, but that doesn't have anything installed locally. The whole thing only drawing about 20 watts that it can get with power over Ethernet from the network cable.
This hooks to a big main computer at each site. The more terminals attached, the beefier this central computer is. The central computer additionally uses all the excess CPU power on all attached machines as a cluster of CPU's for rapidly calculating end of month, or for selling excess CPU to other companies like a utility. The software as a service is cached and executed on this local server in some standard web 3.0 manner. In fact, a standard way of caching SaaS on local machines is going to be the defining characteristic of web 3.0 software.
If I buy a copy of Office today, I know that I can always get access to the files I create with it. Even if it's a hassle--having to reinstall every X days because their product activation server was dismantled years ago--I can always do it. Can the same be said of Google Apps? Of whatever Microsoft offering you're discussing? In 10 years, if I need access to my financial documents, will they still be around? Maybe, maybe not, but it's a pretty huge uncertainty right now. And that's the rub--that's the thing that, if left unaddressed, will prevent me from ever subscribing to software-as-a-service for anything important.
Except "Please switch to browser X version Y", "Install plugin from vendor Z", "Enable anoying feature U", "Disable extension V", and so on. And if you replace flaky browsers with custom software or applets, you're back at square one.
Antivirus and Cedega are mediums between pure software as a service (web interfaces) and shrinkwrap software. Software as a service might be done right, and it might not be. In the case of Vista, lots of people were working in 'degraded' mode because the authentication software was broken. In Antivirus terms, they wouldn't be able to use their software for protection during the outage. The software was designed to be defective, in this case, and a bug triggered it for everyone. This is a problem. A large company hit with a bug like this might lose millions, or even billions, from the lack of productivity during this outage.
What if Office was like this? Would I be unable to access my documents, even if all of the software and documents were stored locally, because Office phoned home and Microsoft thought it was invalid? What if Vista was installed at the 911 call center? Or in the EMS van? Or at a hospital? This is a fundamentally flawed design, simply because computers have become critical parts of our lives. It's bad enough dealing with local bugs that might cause our computers to behave in unexpected ways--now we have to worry that the software will phone home and get a wrong number, or worse?
Software as a service won't be viable until the Internet is more reliable and more interactive.
Right now, dealing with company's oversubscribed servers and under subscribed bandwidth makes response time as bad as it used to be when green screen terminals were attached to mainframes.
The rule used to be response time should be no longer than two to four seconds. How often do you wait for considerably more than four seconds for a Web server to respond?
Granted, the four second rule was more or less intended for more "interactive" activities (like data entry) than mere Web browsing. But the whole SaaS and Web 2.0 stuff is intended for exactly that - interaction with applications over the Web.
And right now, Web response time just doesn't cut it.
When the telcos get their head out of their butts - or someone does it for them - and we get 100Mbps or more speed to the desktop AND the people who offer SaaS learn what the words "load balancing" mean, maybe then it will be viable.
Right now, every time I go to Superiorpics.com for my babe picture downloads, I click on a link to Shareavenue, I'm lucky they respond in less than thirty seconds to a minute. And twice this week they've been completely down. Not to mention the WGA outage which started this discussion.
It's ridiculous.
Add to that the mysterious ability of data transmitted over the Net to literally CRASH an application such as a browser. I've never understood that. Most desktop applications read files and other data and have mechanisms in place to treat that data AS data, no matter how malformed it may be. If it's wrong, they complain without crashing (usually - there are numerous exceptions, of course.) But when we go to network apps, somehow all that goes out the window - and crashes are regular. Maybe it's because network protocols have states and when data is lost, the states get corrupted and the network apps aren't coded to deal with that because of the rigidity of the protocol. There's the simple issue of knowing when the next network data packet just isn't coming and how to recover from that. But most network apps seem as fragile as glass to bad data. Firefox just grinds to a halt or bombs immediately when multimedia data coming in isn't as expected.
The reliability just isn't there.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
On the contrary, installation will be required every time. If the source is down, you have no software and you cannot work.
Sorry, but this is just silly. Are you suggesting that desktop applications never fail? At least if my disk crashes I can go to another machine and keep working. FWIW, disk failures have happened to me a lot more than my SaaS app not being available and they consume a WHOLE lot more of my time to fix.
Good IT departments...
Not everybody has the dollars or people available to do the maintenance you suggest, and the unique customizations you speak of are indeed responsible for lots of bugs and upgrade hassles. The best way to limit that problem is to do small updates often and to tightly control customizations.
You are seriously saying that an app on some web server somewhere...
Yeah, seriously. Most business people simply do not have the option of fixing their own stuff and don't want to have to wait for IT to do it. What is the difference between being reliant on an overworked IT staff or being reliant on a vendor whose existence relies on the application you're trying to use? I'd rather pay money to the vendor than to an internal resource. That way I can focus on MY business (not IT) and let the Vendor focus on theirs.
The whole "you don't have control" argument is just FUD. You have to manage risk. What happens if a flood/whatever hits your office? Most decent SaaS companies are in data centers geographically distributed to prevent such disasters. What happens if your bank goes under? Do you hide your money in the hall closet? What if your credit card processing agency or payroll company goes defunct? Do you have control over your electricity flow? Aren't those considered critical to your business? If the shrinkwrap software has a bug in it (remember the ghastly problems with MS-WORD?), do you have ANY more control than the user using the online app? I can bet the online app will be fixed faster!
This isn't a theoretical exercise to me. My company has saved a ton of money and hassle by outsourcing some enterprise apps and the more we can push off the better. We keep outsourced critical data independently backed up (just as we would with a internal app). We know how to extract what we need from that data too.
I'm not suggesting that every company should use software as a service; I just know I'll outsource any software I reasonably can.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Don't forget about one of the more colorful episodes in the license vs. buy issue. That was the time that a parking garage in Hoboken New Jersey let a poorly-negotiated software licesnse expire, rendering a robotic parking structure inoperable yet full of cars which were stuck there for several days, as discussed on Slashdot some time ago
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Everyone who RTFA did so on a service (a web service)
Everyone who read and or posted replies did so on a service (slashdot).
Can you actually think of the last peice of software you used that wasnt dependent on something on the internet?
Looking at my taskbar right now, I have Sql Server studio open (connected to a server), a browser window (each of the 5 tabs, connected to a different server), Visual Studio (connected to a dev server), a bit torrent client (connected to about a dozen peers) Outlook (which periodically hits 3 different email servers, checking for new messages) Pidgin (connected to three different chat networks) And in the systray I have McAffee, which checks its master server for the latest spam/virus/firewall threats to constantly scan it all.
Ahh, actually I DID use both notepad and calc today, so I guess I'm not totally dependent on the internet for my work.
Just because you get food poisoning once does not mean you should stop eating. Just stop eating at the place that sold you that dodgy burger.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...is right twice a day.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
No. I'm telling you that with a web app, installation is required every time, if indeed the site is accessible and operating properly and hasn't lost your data or "shared" it with half the hackers on the planet. As compared to typically once with a desktop or laptop app. If you'd like to compare the failure rate of installed applications against the failure rate of network connectivity plus your computer plus the remote site, and possibly plus a browser, then I'm perfectly ready to suggest that your computer will be a heck of a lot more reliable on its own.
I wasn't suggesting maintenance. I was pointing out why you want to choose when to upgrade, as opposed to have it forced on you, and using the best practices of people who really know what they are doing to demonstrate why.
Or for a web site to come back up, or for the cable the post hole digger cut be repaired, or the phone company to recover from that lightning strike, or the hack of the provider to be undone. That's why it is *always* better to have your software on your machine, where YOU can control it. There are far fewer points of failure with installed binaries; there is literally no way around this. Doesn't matter if you have an IT department, or if you are the "IT department", you're still better off.
If you have a local install, a physical, legal, or commercial disaster at your office or power provider could get you. Perfectly true.
However, if you have a web app, a physical, legal, or commercial disaster at your local workplace or power provider will STILL get you, but you can add to this that any disaster at the network service provider location, any router location, the web app provider location, any interconnecting connection, other people's overloading of traffic, hacks anywhere along the line - now all these can get you as well. You've not ameliorated any of your risk with your web app, you've simply added more. A lot more. So your suggestion of local problems as being comparable is simply not true; it is incorrect at its core.
There are two ways to manage risk. First, minimize your exposure. This argues against web apps, because using a web app in every case will increase your exposure.
The second can be in conflict with the first. It is provide redundancy. If said redundancy is, for instance, allowing some other entity access to your data, then you are, unfortunately, multiplying your risk. The correct way to do this is create physical encrypted backups and store them off-site in a bank vault located such that no disaster smaller than a nuclear weapon can get both your archives and your local data; my companies use safe deposit boxes in not-very nearby towns and regular, carefully vetted swap and update methods to eliminate network risks and keep our data relatively safe. This isn't because we're large; it is because we're careful.
Either way, exposure to local disasters is always far less than exposure to disasters distributed everywhere along the chain that starts with you and ends with the web app provider.
Interesting question. In fact, I don't keep any significant percentage of my money in banks. Nor do I keep the majority of it in paper money. Nor do I borrow money. So if the local bank - or any other bank - goes under, I yawn and go on
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Many of the arguments for reliability, susceptibility to hacking and single point of failure are not justifiable. Yes, sure if a company sets things up poorly there will be reliablity problems.
But take Slashdot for example, it is very similar to software as a service. We write, read, share, and search for information. It's been very resistant to hacking, denial of service and has an amazing level of up time and fast clean connections from almost anywhere on Earth.
The same can be said of Google, yahoo and AOL.
Techniques with redundancy like multiple server room locations (1000's of miles apart), multiple backbone and Internet providers, computer clusters, fail over and distributed software architectures can make up times very high.
The Internet is still relatively new, and here in the US we take reliable phone and power for granted, but for much of the world, the Internet is far more reliable then phones or power. I can personally vouch for that just from my last trips to China and India.
I think it safe to assume Internet connectivity and web sites will only get more reliable.
Now look at local PC software, that is far more susceptible to data lost from power glitches, disk failures, fire, water damage from firemen or sprinklers, viruses, sabotage, prying eyes, computer theft or just plain old fashion stupidity, as in "rm -rf " in the wrong directory.
Also Software as a service is priceless when doing collaboration with people around the country or world. Also when traveling it can make laptops see like an unnecessary hassle to lug around and constantly worry about theft, damage, airport security and customs duties extortion common in third world countries.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
And I completely agree! For the record the only reason I would advise someone to use Live Office IS to sign up for the free level and make Microsoft pay for a domain. Even for the situations I mentioned there are better services for a similar price point. Even with the growing distrust of Google at least they use ODF file formats for their online apps. If ever there is a time to INSIST on an open format and the right to save offline copies of your info easily it is when you are signing up with a software service. No matter how much you love and trust a company you always want an offline backup.
Software as a service is a service like any other, you always check their work and have an alternate plan in case they close up shop.
Insert pithy comment here.
History: ARPANET & BBN ~1967~ http://web.mit.edu/cms/Events/mit2/Abstracts/Terje Rasmussen.pdf
....
... [anyway you can read the rest for yourself RTF-URL/*.pdf].
... using PTP encryption with multiple servers/platforms, operating systems, applications ... OSS & proprietary (I think) could be configured in to far larger networks with greater robustness, survivability, and security. The one-way model ain't never the best, but it makes folks feel more in control, which is never a reason to feel secure.
Basically the backbone of the internet started with a US 1960s cold-war requirement to build a highly robust and survivable telecommunications network for reliable delivery of data/content traffic from a source to a specified destination. LAN/WAN concepts were understood as well as requirements for protocols like TCP/IP for routing and delivery of content. Then Tim Burner-Lee at CERN in EU was the creator of the initial WWW protocols and the first website in the world was at CERN on 1991/08/06. Now that I provided credit to
The internet purpose was valid, but has been forgotten by DoD and other money bag sources. The security fear has created (I believe) tunnel vision and a total lack of wit to look at past lessons-learned and solutions provided as having technology application value to today's network security survivability problems (no surprise).
Internet purpose:
1. Essential task to transfer data reliably from source to destination.
2. Average transit time should be less than half a second.
3. Subnets should operate autonomously.
4. Hardware should be robust and reliable.
Baran's theory was distributed communications/networks (LAN/WAN) signified many switching nodes and many links attached to each node. The system built in a high degree of network redundancy to make it more difficult to isolate users. Knocking out some nodes could not paralyze the whole network. The improbability of network communications through long-distance networks was thereby highly probable (with the right protocol usage). Store and forward switching which Baran adapted, made it possible for information to follow different routes to its destination. Each 'message block' was labeled with
information about addressee and address, and this was passed on from one switching node to another, this was to be called packet switching. Messages were in digital form and could be
My Point: I strongly agree with Dvorak, "Don't trust" any single point of failure architectures. DoD and others are so damn focused on control of architecture (hardware and software) and management of networks that all the chickens and eggs are being put into one basket (point of failure). I call it a "point of failure" or at least a very limited number of "point of failure" architectures. This type of architecture provides an "easy to defend" false sense of security, but is without doubt an easy Enemy-Cracker-Target (ECT). Cracker-Weapon technology and applications can be developed with a specificity breaching any of many perceived/potential weak points of defense. Figuratively the breach would be like a dam-failure flooding the common community valley.
Many small diverse LAN architectures of ~50 users behind a poxy-server, router/switch, firewall
Yes, the management of such a network would cost more, but if security is more than a complex-password and PGP/PKI, then DoD and others in IT engineering and hardware/applications development may need to rethink the single point of failure architecture as a sensible strategy for security.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Good IT departments test VERY carefully before allowing an upgraded or even bugfixed app loose in a large installed base. This is because every company will have core things that they do which are unique to them, and the software "upgrade" may break those tasks. This is a VERY common problem. What you have no is no control over those damage inflicting "upgrades." This is not a good thing. There's a very good reason software isn't just handed to people in shrink wrap with a laconic "hey, install this."
I would say GREAT IT departments test VERY carefully before allowing an upgraded or even bugfixed app loose in a large installed base.
GOOD IT Dept's test a little, but still patch systems (bug fix/service packs)
I'd wager MOST IT Dept's either don't patch, or if they do...they wait several weeks/months to patch...that way "all the bugs are shaken out" (heh, yea right. most are too busy putting out fires to deal with yet-another-patch for the n desktops they take care of)
(talking about the vast unwashed masses of corporate desktops, not servers)
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
WGA is software as a service? I can't think of any "service" I've ever received from it - unless you count the updates and patches you need to keep your Windows machines even marginally secured. Was I stupid to subscribe to WGA, as Dvorak states? Maybe, but not as stupid as I would have been to leave my desktop unpatched. If I'm stupid either way, maybe Dvorak would agree that my true stupidity was running Windows in the first place, instead of Linux or OS X, which don't require such nonsense.
I can see no technical reason why "software as a service" would require you to store your data at the service provider only. Of course, the service provider probably would want you to, to be able to lock you in, but then you should take your business elsewhere.
I use a calendar application of a large service provider. Yes, they do store all my calendaring data, but, so do I. It's regularly downloaded from them and inserted into my desktop PIM system.
I would not trust them with sensitive data, but the benefits of me and my family being able to share calendars in nearly real-time is way beyond the possible misuse of the information "Who's picking up the children at school?"
... he must be living in a very nice ivory tower. Actually I agree with him on things like online office applications and other software of the same complexity level. It probably will be faster, cheaper and more reliable to have them locally. But as software complexity increases (think ERP applications) software-as-a-service becomes a much more attractive proposition. Complex, mission critical applications that need to be configured and fine tuned for months and require several experts to run (ýeah, I'm looking at you SAP ;) benefit greatly from being centralized because the knowledge about the systems needn't be transfered to the "end-user" (=customer), lines of comunication (support -> developement) are much shorter and expensive equipment (fire extinguishers, fail-over power supply, ventilation) don't have to be present at each customer side.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
A word processor could be a service but also could store the data locally into the user's computer. But Microsoft (or any other company for that matter) recognizes the value of data and the value of the vendor lock in, and chooses to store all the data in a central server.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The upside to the customer is not so easy to find, unless you consider the possibility that with all this hypothetical easy money flowing in, Microsoft would be able to make a better product.
The problem is always the same. The power users/players devour all the "new content" and the newbies are left with massive grinding to keep up.
I want my word processor to have a good strong story line. And I want my spreadsheet to do more than manage my user/player stats. My DB should have all the equipment stats preloaded, and updated in real time with what all the other player/users have equipped.
If you expect the user/play to pony up each month, we need more and better content!
That afterall is what we have come to expect from "productivity" software. Oh, and higher level caps too!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
One of the most pointless articles I have ever read. I agree that MGA is not so advantages to the customer but the rest of stuff on SAAS is pure junk.
Would you say the concept of cable TV can't be relied on because sometimes your local cable goes out-of-service? Do you write off telephone/cell phone communication and say such devices and architecture can't be trusted because sometimes the network is not available.
Why don't we just scrape the whole internet concept since you can't control how every packets of data sent will be used and stored all the time? Better yet, let me throw my computer out the window because I had to reboot it more than once this month due to random crashes that sometimes I have no control over.
The whole point of using a service, from restaurants to SAAS, is to delegating some work to the service provider. Obviously not all service providers can be trusted and not all restaurants prepare dishes just the way you like it. That is a fact of life. It does not mean that the concept of dining out can't be trusted because you can potentially die from food poisoning.
If you are not comfortable at delegating work (important of not) to some one else, then don't do it - don't use the service or simply find a service provider that you can get comfortable with.
Dvorak is the Andy Rooney of the tech world. Old, crotchety, and likes the old ways best.
He is clown shoes, a coot, a codger. I can't imagine how he attracts readers/listeners.
At first I sorta agree with Dvorak, but...
Guys like Dvorak and me are old school nerds. We've grown up always owning the processor, and now as we age, we're less willing to make the risky changes that changing from control of the application from our machines to "their" machines.
Really, the change from the paper world to the PC world was just as risky as the change from the PC world to the network app model. 20 years ago PCs (including my beloved Macs) were unreliable, limited and "flakey". Try taking a modern publication to a printer house on a floppy disk, even if that were still the standard. It'd nearly mean a disk for every page, and imagine a crook disk in that pile. That was a pretty typical example of the sort of thing faced 20 years ago in the computing world with localised processing.
So, yeh, I prefer to own my processor, but online apps will get better, just like our private boxes did.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
Your pathetic attempt at poking fun at Richard Stallman is duly noted.
If it weren't for him you'd be paying through the nose even more for every piece of software you use now.
Big business and free software are enemies - for every business that would LOVE to use software for free there's a company desperately hoping to make them pay for it. The GPL ensures that there is at least a balance partially in favor of everyone - businesses and citizens - using some software for free.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Parent can't take a joke - lack of sense of humour duly noted.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
No, No, No! That only serve to show how much M$ is incompetent to offer "Software as Services". I always said if Microsoft would depend of "Service", it bankrupts. Their native culture is proeminently industrial.