Lawnmower as a Service

Software as a service is a great idea (for lots of reasons - stay tuned for future posts!). However the phrase "software as a service" strikes me as unfortunate. A big part of why SAAS is a powerful idea is, it makes providers and customers think differently about software - the technology, the commercial relationship, who does what, who pays which costs, who bears which risks and so on - but the phrase "software as a service" itself traps us into thinking about software. The point of software as a service is the service (what is delivered), not the software (how the service is implemented). This is a crucial distinction and it gets a little lost in the "SAAS" terminology.

Think about other services you use in your daily life. I have a person who mows my yard for me. Guess what he calls his business - it is a Lawn Service, not Lawnmower as a Service (LAAS). I don't care how he cuts my grass, as long as the result is good - he could use a rotary push lawnmower, a gas-powered lawnmower, a pair of scissors. I would object if he used an unsafe or ridiculous tool - no flamethrowers please - but within the bounds of common sense and accepted best practice, the lawn guy can cut my yard any way he sees fit.

This is obvious in the context of real-world services we all know outside the realm of software. Do any of these make sense?

To my ear, these all sound ridiculous, and actually so does the phrase "software as a service". Forget there is software in the mix at all. What service (what result) are you trying to achieve?

Maybe the right way to achieve your result is via services delivered hands-on by human beings. There are problems that are not worth generalizing and capturing as the expensive intellectual property we call "code". In my years in the software industry, I have seen many man-years of effort wasted trying to write code for operations that would have been better done one-off by an expert. This is not "Expert as a Service" (EAAS) but just, consulting.

Or possibly the right way to achieve your result is via services that include some SAAS, some software and hardware that really should be on your premises, and a certain amount of human-powered expert knowledge as well. This is what I call a managed service - people in the loop to manage the things you don't want to so you don't have to.

Although I believe in "software as a service" as a great business model and design model for many kinds of problems, it isn't the only way to solve the broad range of issues our industry is suffering from. One of the tricks I learned a long time ago as a product manager is to listen to the words customers use, but dig beneath the exact words to get at the underlying motivation. I think in many cases when a customer says "I want a SAAS solution", they may actually be saying, "I want a solution that is convenient and cost-effective, that does not give the vendor all the money up-front so they lose their motivation to help me succeed, that does not assign me most of the risk and the vendor most of the reward". Of course in some cases the customer is literally saying, "I want this app in SAAS mode of delivery, stop screwing around" and we need to be prepared to hear that too.

Here's to software as a service and any other model that improves on the "put a CD in a box and mail it to the customer" model. Here's to problem solving with the full range of tools and ideas available to us.