SaaS-pocalypse chatter is doomster pr0n. It would be nice if enterprise IT were boring again

Say goodbye to the SaaS-pocalypse theory, which posits that advances in AI will bring the software-as-a-service market to its knees. Say hello to "a feedback loop with no natural brake." Or doomster porn, as others would have it. At the beginning of this week, we woke up to a world where a single tech-related post could shake …

[Doctor Syntax]

It is not just the cost of building software that prevents newcomers from taking chunks out of the enterprise software market; it is inertia lock in.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

But a lot of their "lock-in" is providing consultancy

So if instead of paying SAP / Salesforce / Beelzebub Inc, $10K/day to change the format of a report - Deepseek.ai can write the script for free.

I am confused why Microsoft is down 30%, it's not like anyone is going to vibe-code their own in-house Teams/Office360.5/OS

[captain veg]

it's not like anyone is going to vibe-code their own in-house Teams/Office360.5/OS

That appears to be exactly what Microsoft has been doing recently.

-A.

[Crypto Monad]

I am confused why Microsoft is down 30%, it's not like anyone is going to vibe-code their own in-house Teams/Office360.5/OS

Perhaps because Microsoft itself owns a large chunk of the AI bubble? When Amazon made a large investment in AI, their stock went down markedly too.

[Random as if !]

Yep , and it's the locking that made us look first at azure services and functions, then the weather of knowledge on these and towards containerisation and maybe building an app that takes the 10% we use of everyone's SaaS , and making what we need , with actual developers, analysts and architects , savings are huge.

[elsergiovolador]

Funny

With Opus 4.6, you can fairly easily clone whatever SaaS you want and tailor it to your company's specific workflows. You still need experienced developers and business analysts at the very least to drive it, but the long-term savings could be immense - and you don't have to hand over your data.

[Peter-Waterman1]

Re: Funny

I agree with this. The bar to build in house has been lowered massively. I think we will see a lot of things come back in house where they pay less, customise more.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Funny

Our corporate masters made us use expensive corporate Github and expensive corporate Atlassian wiki - the reason we didn't just host internally was apparently all the "added value" "interoperations" and "features" - which I suspect they mean pretty dashboards - which an ai+stunned-herring could code

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Funny

There is such mentality often where person looks down on thing made in house. Like when we were poor my Mum was making me clothes instead of buying from shops. Peers laughed at me for being a povvo not wearing nice things, but looking back, these were miles better in every respect than designer overpriced slop.

Also "everyone does it" thing. They go for beers and mate who has different company asks: "You still run your little servers? We are on the cloud, see *whips out the phone* here is the dashboard, I see everything. No need to chase Josh at night anymore because something blew up."

But they don't mention if there is an outage, they can now only chase a chatbot and FOMO landed.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Funny

Funny thing is that these are open source development tools, for a bunch of developers, who all use Linux

But corporate IT are upto their necks in Microsoft and SAP and Salesforce etc, so I think you're exactly correct

[theOtherJT]

Re: Funny

I had someone do that to me. I got out my phone, opened my IRC client, and pointed out all the messages that were being pushed in from my production CI system. Look at all my nice warnings. If any of these goes critical I'll get an alert right here. Same as your dashboard - except I didn't pay anyone to host it because this is all community code that's decades old operating according to standards that are even older.

I then SSH'd into my work gateway host and asked it to do a --dry-run update of all the infra. Nothing to do. See, all my infra is healthy, and if it wasn't I'd have been alerted and could have fixed it right here from my phone.

As long as we didn't lose internet in the office to the point at which I was unable to connect to it at all, I'm golden - and if we *had* lost internet in the office to that extent then all our cloud services would have become unavailable to anyone who wasn't working from home - which given that this was in 2016 was everyone, because basically no one was allowed back then.

Tell me what service I could have bought that would have been able to do that and how much I would have to pay for it please? Because this costs me precisely zero in licencing fees and is supported by the three in-house IT staff that we already had anyway who spend their spare time between doing desktop support, hardware replacements, and attending annoying meetings finding ways to make it more robust.

He decided he didn't want to talk to me any more.

God I miss working there. We're all cloud now at my current place.

[Random as if !]

Re: Funny

Greg?...

Not old Greg ,just incase!

[doublelayer]

Re: Funny

I'm interested to see if that turns out to happen. A lot of places could have avoided many SaaS products, except that maintenance and development were too hard for them that they ended up accepting the SaaS vendors' relatively lackluster versions of both. There was no reason why they couldn't hire some people to build that themselves or at least hire internal teams to develop around some core they chose rather than have the external provider build it for them. Factors other than technical practicality were part of this, and those will likely still exist for the LLM-written version, even assuming that the LLM-written version actually works which is far from proven.

One problem that is likely to be around, though I don't know how much damage it will cause, is that such things often get new parts bolted on. LLMs aren't great at making incremental changes. Even if something works well at the start, it still has to last the ravages of time and little mandated changes to succeed. We have two competitors who are both quite bad at achieving greatness, so there might be a more interesting competition than LLMs normally face. I'd still give the SaaS vendors the edge here because they do have the lock-in factors already. The first step in porting an existing implementation to something new is seeing if the LLM can reverse-engineer the database all the important data is in.

[paluster]

It's not the AI

I dont think that it will be AI that dents the AsAService growth. Ut will be when people realise rhat the CLOUD Act doesnt just apply to traditional cloud vendors (Google, Azure, AWS &Oracle). The a t applies to everything stored on servers "owned and mabagwd" by American firms. If you have webmail or your IMAP settings leave the emails on the server then if the provider is American then the Act applies.

In the current climate that is going to make all the magor ERP suppliers except SAP even more unpopular in Europe than they already are. I'm quite surprised that SAP arent pushing that angle yet.

[Bebu sa Ware]

The whole circus is turning into one massive toss·a·thon

with legions of would be pundit pulling large audiences.

The question of course is "pulling large audiences' what?"

[paluster]

Re: The whole circus is turning into one massive toss·a·thon

Ask each pf the chatbots that question. It will be a good test of what guardrails are in place

[Crypto Monad]

It's an interesting read, but I can see several weaknesses in their arguments.

1. Every business starts to write their own software instead of spending $500K/yr on SaaS fees. However, the Anthropics and OpenAI's of this world who make this possible will be looking to capture a substantial portion of that $500K. You replace SaaS with AIaaS, and the more you're hooked, the more they'll take. Also, when your AI-software breaks, or screws up a high value transaction, there is no accountability - you are on your own to support the resulting mess. (Or you need AI to do that for you too). Liability is the brake against in-sourcing; it's one of the reasons people have been outsourcing.

2. AI agents will act purely in the interests of consumers, and hence destroy the sellers. Why would they? Surely the purveyors of the AI agents will make them act in their own interests, in the same way as Google results are skewed by advertising: the agents will send customers to the seller that makes the agent the most commission, not the one that offers the best deal to the consumer. After all, the consumers are unlikely to pay for the agents, any more than they pay for search.

3. Visa and Mastercard will fail because blockchain is cheaper. There's nothing about blockchain which makes transactions fundamentally cheap: indeed, quite the opposite. All that Visa and Mastercard do is to record transactions in a database. It's possible that more challengers will spring up, in the way that Paypal, Wise and so on have already done. But much of that 1-3% credit card transaction fee goes on fulfilling legal requirements, consumer protection, covering bad debts and so on. You can in any case do bank-to-bank transactions essentially for free today already.

[wolf2600]

I thought the benefit of SaaS was companies didn't have to pay to operate their on-prem data centers.

It wasn't the development costs which were driving adoption of OTS cloud products, but the operational costs of self-hosting.

[ecofeco]

It was at one time. Same with cloud.

But today's business geniuses seem to have never heard of lock-in, loss leader pricing, licensing/service quit fees, and putting the screws to your customers.

[spacecadet66]

> Citrini Research is a little-known US firm that [writes science fiction to get attention]

Fixed that for you.