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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

I watched the whole interview. In summary I'd say that while obviously talented at art, music and logic with a solid ethical outlook (rare and admirable) chiefly what they appear to have learned is that: (1) being poor on a boat is a great way to understand why SaaS sux; (2) being in the middle of nowhere with zero supply chain is a great way to understand why BigCo supply chain and closed hardware sux; (3) using old hardware is a great way to understand we all have far more hardware than we really need; (4) an open SaaS-free bigco-free toolkit for creativity is a piece of paper and a pen or its nearest digital equivalent; (5) adding cloud features to programs is not good for the user base.

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wrt (5): Is it not good for the user base at large or is it not good for users who choose to live as nomads on a boat?

I feel like we have to be realistic about the problems we’re solving here—-is the goal to optimize for 95% of users or 100%? If 100%, I have to ask if the tradeoffs for the last 5% of users are worth the squeeze to the 95%? SaaS really is the right solution for many people; not all but many.

> SaaS really is the right solution for many people; not all but many.

SaaS is a great solution for people selling software to have locked in revenue and customers who can’t leave.

For actual customers there used to be a time you could but some software, install it and then just run it for years. No forced recurring payments, no forced updates that break your workflows, no unnecessary look&feel changes every year, etc.

Spend any amount of time talking to customers and you may find that many of them, maybe even most, don't want the responsibility of maintaining infrastructure. They want "insert money, get more software." The few that run their own infrastructure often come back to SaaS after realizing they made a monkey's paw wish. Many aren't ready for, or interested in, that level of involvement and responsibility. It's a burden, and the economies of scale available to software make marginal scaling more efficient when done by the provider. Not always, but it's often a perfect fit.

But only a bad salesman dictates what the customer needs— talk to your customers.

Hence my using Gnucash over Quickbooks. It just works, they don't charge me to access my own data, and the interface is extremely stable.

While that might be a neat write-off mental model for the convenient few, from the perspective of most of the world, many modern software developers is live in affluent situations where processing power, memory, screen size, and connectivity are basically guaranteed. Anywhere else (much of the world) has issues with the systems they design.

This is not a 5% thing, it's a >50% potential users thing. Viewed that way, it makes commercial sense to consider them. However, SaaS was usually an exploitative now-or-never growth model seeking unrealistic returns in a short period based on false economics, so give-a-damn was already managed out of corporate scope.

The off the grid experience and journey discussed highlights how little hardware and connectivity we really need. Writing that off on the proviso it's economically 'smart' to ignore users misses the intellectual point.

3 is also relevant in the current consumer hardware "crisis". The more I think about it, the more I realize I dont even want to by anything in 2027. Not just because prices exploded. Sure, thats the initial motivation. But the truth is, most of us have enough stuff lying around at home that we can easily go for the next 4+ years without buying anything new.

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