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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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Wow, an assembly programmer who builds his own chips? Where do you find the time to /.?
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
... 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"
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.
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.
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
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.