Software will be easy to create, which will kill moats and margins on existing products. The game is up for pure saas. Smart money started pricing this in one year ago
For a lot of SaaS firms, a big part of their value is the domain knowledge and best practices encoded in the software.
Current AIs often do a bad job of that. Sure, they know a lot of it. But they also get a lot of it wrong, and can’t tell the difference between genuinely good advice, and advice that sounds good but is practically worthless or even harmful.
(Of course I’m biased since I work for a SaaS firm. But I’m talking about them in general, not just my current employer.)
Was the hard part ever really the software, though? It's the Service part of SaaS that seems to provide the moat. Lock-in, habits, workflows, integrations, and trust. And don't discount the appeal of making some part of your operations "someone else's problem." Could you hire engineers or use an LLM to make your own Google Docs? Probably, yeah, but would that be worth the headache of being responsible for a bespoke internal document system?
You might think you can, for a while. Been there, done that. But you probably can not do so sustainably in most cases. Even if you could, would you really be better off building vs. buying? Outsourcing development, operations, and maintenance is almost always the better choice, letting you focus on the things you do uniquely, differentiably, or meaningfully better.
"We have this awesome internal version of Docs that we're responsible for fixing, upgrading, and doing support for" is not the flex "AI can code anything!" aficionados think it is. Especially when you also have similar internal versions of Sheets, Jira, Slack, GitHub, Linux, Postgres, and 100 other tools.
Making your own Google Docs is stupid unless your company's core business is document management.
OTOH Replacing SAP with a bespoke system will make a lot of sense for many companies.
SAP is already the worst of both worlds. It'll have been highly customized for your flow so you've got all of the headaches of bespoke software and all of the headaches of SaaS. And unlike Google Docs, it'll be highly integral to your core business.
the problem is an AI can figure out habits and workflows pretty seamlessly. lock-in is artificial and loses power when it's really easy to make a competing app for large swaths of web apps.
integration is likely the most valuable part of the puzzle, but it's also prone to disruption
I think all that's left are like <50 apps each with their own very bespoke and "power user"-ready interface
Can't wait for every hospital to create their own patient record system, every accounting office to create their own accounting software, every car service to create their own timebooking solution, etc.
skissane|29 days ago
Current AIs often do a bad job of that. Sure, they know a lot of it. But they also get a lot of it wrong, and can’t tell the difference between genuinely good advice, and advice that sounds good but is practically worthless or even harmful.
(Of course I’m biased since I work for a SaaS firm. But I’m talking about them in general, not just my current employer.)
llmslave|29 days ago
idle_zealot|29 days ago
jonathaneunice|29 days ago
"We have this awesome internal version of Docs that we're responsible for fixing, upgrading, and doing support for" is not the flex "AI can code anything!" aficionados think it is. Especially when you also have similar internal versions of Sheets, Jira, Slack, GitHub, Linux, Postgres, and 100 other tools.
bryanlarsen|29 days ago
Making your own Google Docs is stupid unless your company's core business is document management.
OTOH Replacing SAP with a bespoke system will make a lot of sense for many companies.
SAP is already the worst of both worlds. It'll have been highly customized for your flow so you've got all of the headaches of bespoke software and all of the headaches of SaaS. And unlike Google Docs, it'll be highly integral to your core business.
airstrike|29 days ago
integration is likely the most valuable part of the puzzle, but it's also prone to disruption
I think all that's left are like <50 apps each with their own very bespoke and "power user"-ready interface
llmslave|29 days ago
senko|29 days ago
Or you can just ask your LLM to install https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online
Between open source, LLMs, and SaaS vendors getting greedy and privacy invasive, the total pain minimization calc might shift for some orgs.
Hamuko|29 days ago
ncruces|29 days ago
Supermancho|29 days ago
Having worked in healthcare, this is the current state (per provider, not physical building).
tjr|29 days ago
Are there any software products that you think will survive?
aurareturn|28 days ago
Software is much easier to create. It used to take 100 people to create a competitor SaaS product. Now it might take 3 people.
Traditional SaaS companies that don't have a data moat is in trouble.
Physical companies will dominate more than SaaS companies in the future. By physical, I mean energy and chips companies.