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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

It's a SaaS, when in the history of SaaS has it ever been a good idea to trust that the company won't ruin the product under you?

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I think there's a pretty big difference here. It's not like Github prevents you from building a Github competitor. Or Linear is preventing you from using it to build a Linear competitor.

This is more akin to Windows somehow preventing you from building a new OS.

Or worse yet, sabotaging vs preventing.

A surprising number of companies do include “you may not use the service we provide you to compete with us” in their terms of service.

(edit)

After a quick search the best example is Atlassian. It would (apparently, IANAL) break terms to plan a JIRA competitor using JIRA.

  > Customer must not (and must not permit anyone else to): [...] (d) use the Products to develop a similar or competing product or service

https://www.atlassian.com/legal/atlassian-customer-agreement

Also Salesforce. Their competitors are explicitly disallowed from using any of their services for any reason.

  > SFDC’s direct competitors are prohibited from accessing the Services, except with SFDC’s prior written consent.

https://www.salesforce.com/en-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/...

Perhaps provide an example or two?

Was the parent comment edited, because it does have a couple of examples in it

Yes, I edited after about 20 minutes to add examples, mea culpa. Will mark the edit.

I remember working for a company that did a lot of business in logistics. We were strictly prohibited from using any Amazon Web Services because several of our very high profile customers didn’t want anything on AWS. The higher ups were thoroughly convinced Amazon would copy it (and I mean, they came out with a product that competed with us, so they weren’t wrong!)

This kind of stuff “but they’ll copy us” is always weird (and wrong). Logistics isn’t some secret sauce. It’s taught in operations degrees across colleges. If a company is worried that all it takes is another company “copying” their IP to supersede them, then you don’t have a company, you have a simple app.

Amazon didn’t “copy” logistics from Apple. But both of them use similar underlying processes and optimizations. They both excel at it, and neither is eating the other’s profits. The same goes for smaller companies. Or the logistics providers like UPS.

> This is more akin to Windows somehow preventing you from building a new OS.

Tangent, but have you tried repartitioning your Windows disk to make room for a new OS? Or tried to configure Windows to let you dualboot? Or get the clock time right if you dualboot? Or let you debug "Secure Boot"?

Windows is outright hostile when it comes to (sharing with) a new OS

Yeah, MS doesn't quite exemplify good-faith competitive spirit, does it?

Most of the time, which is why SaaS has been very popular.

In comparison to some absurdist baseline maybe, actual software NEVER stops working under you, so in comparison something like an works 80% "most of the time" is godawful. Though I would argue that with SaaS the trend is toward 100% likelyhood to fuck your shit up given enough time, and it has borne out this way in the real world time and time again. SaaS is popular because it allows companies to more effectively extort you for your dollars.

The popularity of SaaS was never derived from the products themselves, but rather business' weird aversion to doing in-house development. Most companies not in tech view software as literal magic, and act as if hiring some engineers could risk opening Pandora's box or something. Banks are particularly notorious for this; despite basically their entire business being done digitally, they treat software as a necessary evil, not as their underlying value.

But, the cost of in-house development just went down significantly. SaaS has always had a lot of broken promises. The thing is the software is never tailored to your use case, and you often have to integrate into your other tools anyway. And, you don't get to control the requirements, features, velocity, or bug fixes. Jira as a bug? Too bad I guess, hopefully it gets fixed eventually.

But the dirty secret is that companies are filled to the brim with bright-eyed aspirational employees, who want nothing more than to make their job easier and their company more efficient. The thing is they're doing it using cursed Excel workbooks on share drives. I think, in the near future, they'll be doing it with hand-rolled applications.

Really funny to describe OpenAI/Anthropic as a "SaaS"

Yeah, care to elaborate? I'm not seeing the joke.

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