Online Software's Potential Problems

John Dvorak had an interesting piece on software as a service (SaaS) - a rising trend in which software companies make software available as hosted services on Internet servers. You pay the fee (or, in the case of a company like Google, don't), and you can then use the software.

Dvorak's rant uses a big SaaS network failure that Microsoft recently had and then goes on to point out the following:

Though tech trends are clearly going in the direction of having apps online, last weekend's massive failure of an important online subsystem does prove that such reliance on the network and applications servers has the potential to be catastrophic. Microsoft is a provider of server software and is more than a little familiar with running huge installations. This 19-hour outage that the company itself said would last perhaps 72 hours happened to Microsoft, not to Alabama Joe's Server Farm and Toaster Repair. So that in itself is scary.

That is certainly true, but hardly inclusive. There are many other potential problems with SaaS:

• If you have that software on a laptop, what happens if you're traveling and can't get an Internet connection? Or if you have to pay additionally for one-day access as happens in many airports? Not only are you at the mercy of network outages, but you're at the mercy of always having that tether to the Internet.


• Your data - possibly sensitive - may be up on someone else's server. Sure, hackers are a ptoential problem. So is industrial espionage, or government subpoena. I'm no lawyer, but I bet that it could be much easier for someone to get information from a third party than directly, because the software host won't want to get in the middle.


• You lose control over what version of the software you're on. I know that keeping up to date is supposed to be one of the features of SaaS - you always have the latest version. But I've seen too many new software versions that turned out to be disasters. It used to be a rule that, at least with many vendors, you'd never upgrade on a new release. Instead, you'd wait some time and see how others fared. With software as a service, that no longer works.


• With SaaS, you keep paying. There's no such thing as owning a license and being able to use it freely. What if the company changes its rates? You end up paying them. If you're running a small business and cash is tight that month, it's another bill that you must pay, or risk losing access to your information.

And that last point is really, I think, the essence of Dvorak's article. Instead of using software as a tool, you are at the mercy of the company. If it goes out of business - as happened with services in the dot com explosion - then it's probably not going to give you advance notice and you may be stuck. If it changes its usage policies, you are stuck. If it has financial difficulties and service suffers, you are stuck. Of course, this entire trend isn't about better service for the user. It's about a sustainable fee structure for the software vendors, who eventually found that the early promise of sell a copy and then sell upgrades eventually putters out as a company reaches a natural saturation point in the market. When you hear a lot of enthusiam for this business model, it's vendors being focused on themselves, not on you, the user.