Rosie's Ramblings

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
      Do You Need Packaged Software?
      When he turned 64 (I think) a friend of mine received a birthday call from someone in the old people's department of a large HMO. The caller offered to upgrade his current health care insurance to a great new plan that would give him coverage during his dwindling remaining years. All he had to do was sign over his Medicare benefits to them, and in return they would eternally provide him with the same health coverage he now gets from his employer ... but at greater cost. The advantage to doing this was a mystery, but the HMO assured my friend he'd be better off.
      And so it is with software as a service (SaaS) and application service providers (ASPs). (How's that for a transition?) If you read the hype from these Web-based service providers, you'll learn that both will guarantee (although not in the license) that as long as you pay your monthly subscription fees, your programs will always work-meanwhile lowering your IT costs, as compared with buy-once-use-forever packages. (Like HMOs, they have only your best interests at heart.)
      SaaS and ASP products are merely new means of delivering software to users?they're neither new markets nor, in most cases, new products. The services are like the trucks that deliver Chilean apples and Israeli avocados to your local supermarket. The difference is that you cannot take these apples home to eat; you have to eat them while you're in the store. Or, to abandon the metaphor before it rots, you pay every month (or year) for the pleasure of having to go up onto the Net to launch Microsoft Office. Think of it as yet another scam to squeeze more profit from software while invading your privacy at the same time. Not a bad one-two punch, huh?
      ASP technology has been around for a while. You (or your company) buy a license for a program, often customized for your needs, and then you find an Internet service provider (ISP) to host the software so it will be available over your network to anyone and everyone in the company. You pay a monthly license fee per person to be able to use the program, and you pay another monthly fee for the network (akin to paying your ISP). Sometimes ASP companies combine the network hosting with the licensing, meaning not necessarily that you save money, but that you have one less bill to pay. And one less software-support guy to point his finger at the other guy.
      Software as a service, also known as software-on-demand, is aimed at small businesses and consumers as well as large companies. Oversimply put, the provider maintains one iteration of a program (Microsoft Office, perhaps, or Corel WordPerfect) online and many, many people log on to the Net and use that program, as if it were installed on their own computers' hard drives. Your employees get to use the software, get updates automatically (because they're installed onto the master copy on the Net), and supposedly receive online tech support. Uh-huh. SaaS providers say the advantages to customers are lower support costs and higher quality of service. True, if the SaaS vendor deploys the Net-based software for you, you need a whole lot fewer IT people on staff. But I'm pretty happy with buying a program and using it without further cost until I upgrade to the next version or a better program.
      I don't see where the SaaS providers talk about the benefits to them: Faster time to market (no packaging, no shipping, no duplicating disks, no retailers) and lower development and marketing costs (a much-reduced sales staff, plus one-time-sale prices are gone, gone, gone, and it's perfect for outsourcing, because you don't have to be in Redmond, Washington, to host an international software server). Technical support costs also are much lower, because the vendor controls how you can customize and use its programs.
      But what do users do when they're offline? How do you get any work done? And how do you know your vendor will still be in business next year?
      The only thing that gives me hope is the fact that the ASP model never really went platinum, and neither did Sun Microsystems' "The Network Is the Computer (or is it "The Computer Is the Network?"), because it is antithetical to the concept of PCs (that is, personal computers). Each time manufacturers have tried to control how and when we use computer programs, pundits like me have shuddered. Then, a whole bunch of very rich people end up calling other very rich people Luddites, and the idea fizzles out. We can only hope.
     

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