Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we can also start moving away from feature-limited Saas offerings that are so damn proud that they focus on One Thing And One Thing Only when customers want just one affordable app to handle all their work and not fifty-eleven ones that become crazy expensive.

View on HN

Customers want those things but the companies you are referring to haven’t been around long enough to build all of them. Believe me, it’s on their slide decks.

In 2013 I joined a company named ZenPayroll, which focused entirely on…well, payroll. That company is now called Gusto and does payroll, health insurance, workers comp, HR, etc.

That didn’t come out of no where, but you have to start someplace.

The history of products has always been bundling and unbundling [0]. There have been products that bundled everything but some customers decided they didn't like the bundle, so they went with a la carte options. Now we're seeing these a la carte companies bundle again to achieve more scale. And then the unbundling will happen again in due time.

It's all cyclical.

[0] https://stratechery.com/concept/business-models/bundling-and...

You seem to be operating under the assumption that an integrated product will necessarily be cheaper, as opposed to simply more convenient.

That's definitely not a necessary result of a combined product offering, but it's interesting to think about.

It's often much cheaper. Take a look at What Microsoft offers with their Office 365 subscription plans or Zoho One.

This topic is pretty well studied and discussed elsewhere, often in the context of antitrust. The Google-able phrase would probably be "bundling vs unbundling" or similar. It's not _always_ the case that a bundled product is cheaper, though, as you point out, often it is.

There are many lawyers representing companies accused of monopolistic behavior who would be on your side of this discussion.

> One Thing And One Thing Only

I mean, that's just fashion that evolved in response to the previous fashion, which was bloated software that did a million things badly. Fair enough that the pendulum should swing back the other way, but there certainly is a place for software that only does one thing and does it well.

The history of tech companies can be viewed as a constant bundling and unbundling of products, depending on where the inefficiency is.

The history of all companies can be viewed as a constant bundling and unbundling.... once upon a time there were these things called conglomerates.

> feature-limited Saas offerings that are so damn proud that they focus on One Thing And One Thing Only when customers want just one affordable app to handle all their work

As a general rule, these two would be very different target markets.

That’s the idea with ERP but in practice the deal is: it does all things for all people, still has holes for edge cases, almost always a horrible UI, and the TCO is way over what’s promised after you pay for implementation and support.

This. And interoperability, stepping over each other, different teams owning different solutions, conflicts and overlaps etc.

Precise why my company built a one-stop-shop SaaS for our domain (revenue operations). We need more of these, thinking from a user's point of view.

oh, so like Apple, but for the B2B space?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com