Giga Bytes worth of literature has been written about the benefits of Cloud Model of Software Delivery and Adoption. All of it is true (!). But ever wonder how it actually helps those who make the Software ?
Making something easy at scale is extremely difficult
Some form and magnitude of software now runs everything from a dishwasher to a Rocket ship. The once revolutionary take of “Software is eating the world” is now the default. Software development process has always been messy and is inefficient, it is not by accident that developer tools segment now has a TAM well into multiple billions. Making something easy at scale is extremely hard. The complexity of problems that software is expected to handle needs an iterative, diligent and resource intensive approach. There are always going to be Bugs, fixes and patches. The more value that a User tries to extract from a software, the more Bugs they eventually end up discovering.
Over decades the “process” took precedence over the product. The process of managing even a reasonably capable enterprise software product will became chaotic. The original objective of delivering maximum value to customer base was at some point was traded in return to answering questions about compatibility and deliverability. External forces like changing business environments, new priorities of the organization make this process even more unproductive.
Supporting Customer Chaos rather than Customer Success.
In the old model, the best resources in the product organization ended up spending their time not on improving its value proposition but on ensuring its backward compatibility. I call it supporting Customer Chaos rather than Customer Success. Anyone who have ever worked in a legacy product organization will readily identify with this problem. The scale of resource drain in product organizations is surprisingly large. It is estimated that up to 30% of the product organization’s time was going into ensuring backward compatibility.
This is the problem that the SAAS model completely eliminates. SaaS model not only solves the problem of Software delivery but it solves the problem of fragmentation. Every customer will get their hands on the best version of the product (a revolutionary idea — which lends to the question — why were paying to continue to use an inferior one?). It is there, available for the business to take advantage of. The Star developer and Engineer can now focus on what the they do best, expand the product capabilities.
There is an added benefit for this model. It shortens the turn around time for the fly wheel that always was there but it is now turning magnitudes faster.