[aobdev]

Thought exercise for those in disagreement: why would every company use AI to build their own payroll/ERP/CRM, when just a handful of companies could use AI to build those offerings better?

This is largely how things work now; AI may lower the cost and increase margins, but the economics of build vs buy seem the same.

[adrianwaj]

To avoid CRAZY SaaS charges. I left a comment further down about how the challenge is first getting a reliable stack running underneath whatever ends up being fast-coded. The trend will be more decentralization - I think that'll be AI 2.0. Increasing centralization is AI 1.0.

[mixdup]

But if that was a goal, or a marketable feature, SaaS and cloud would have competitors out there selling software with perpetual licenses to be run on premises

Yes, the vendors want subscriptions and cloud and not owning anything, but customers also don't want to hire people to operate the infrastructure required to run this stuff themselves. That's the whole point of SaaS, and why some companies just run entirely on that model and basically have no in-house IT staff

That AI means you can write and run your own payroll system doesn't mean all of a sudden a world of people with zero technical skills can start doing it on their own

[dyauspitr]

Every company that I’ve worked at has had to do significant additional development work on their instance of salesforce to make it work for them. Like 6-12 months of work with 1-3 people. I don’t know if this is common but in that case maybe going custom might be the way to go. You get something lean, without all the cruft, specifically built for your usecase and nothing more.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Well the answer is because the cost of that software is lower than somebody building the other software. What happens is that all these SaaS drop in value because it is now realistic to build them internally

[aobdev]

Why does AI make it cheaper to build internal but not cheaper for SaaS competitors to pop up? Everyone has access to the same tools.

[pmmucsd]

Slack is a good example. When the cost of Slack is an unreasonable amount of your operating costs then it makes sense to clone and maintain. The product is simple, you can basically recreate the main functionality in a sitting. Why would you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for it?

[aobdev]

That’s a fine example, but my question then is why does Slack exist? Surely Fortune 500 companies are smart enough to realize that building a slack clone is cheaper, yet they don’t do that.

So now consider AI, perhaps the cost of building has decreased from 100k to 10k. What stops a Slack competitor from also building the product for 10k and reselling it at 10% of the cost of Slack? My point is that I don’t see how AI has changed the value prop.

[dehrmann]

Mattermost is FOSS. Why aren't companies running their own servers to avoid Slack? Prior to OneDrive and web integration, LibreOffice was 95% as good as MS Office, better than VibeOffice will likely be, and it still failed to gain much traction.

[b00ty4breakfast]

I have to imagine that companies pay so much money for Slack because it's actually not that simple.

At the very least, the return is not worth the time and effort.

[nkrisc]

If Slack is so simple why haven’t companies created their own internal versions 10 years ago?

[jayd16]

Slack is an hilarious example.

I can't wait for orgs to try to vibe roll their own dozen clients, security models, and then try to talk to handle external integrations of some kind.

[andersmurphy]

I mean once campfire is full featured free and easy to self host. Completely open source slack replacement.

I imagine it's also infinitely better than anything an in house team could vibe code.

You don't need AI for a cheap slack alternative.

That's why I don't buy any of this.

Companies are not bothering with the free/open alternatives.

Unless the real power of LLMs is making it easy for greg in HR to self host these existing alternatives. But, that a trillion dollar market does not make.