Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, December 3, 2007:
Installable Software
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Interesting post by 37sigs about why they don’t want to sell installable software. Pretty much it’s standard saas reasoning. Obviously I don’t think they need to sell installable software to be successful.
One thing I strongly disagree with them on though is their last point. The ability to offer instant updates is always touted by saas providers, but there is never any discussion of the significant down side of this. Namely that you’re throwing all your users into a new system randomly at the time of “your” choosing not the time of “their” choosing. So when you release a new update with UI changes, it’s just different one day when you login. As a business this idea is not very appealing to me, especially if I have less technical users who I would prefer to train or at least brief on the impending update.
Discussion
It always amazes me that people trust 3rd parties with business critical data. Obviously hosted software has its rightful place on the web but we never use it because we won't hand over critical data to 3rd parties. This applies to everyone from Google to 37Signals to the 100s of "to do" hosted solutions out there. You can't have our data, period.
I suspect that a lot of businesses are that way which is why it sort of amazes me that there isn't more self-hosted software available in the "Basecamp category." Its not a trust issue with 37s or Google, its simply a good policy to not let 3rd parties have your secrets.
Created by Les on 12.03.2007 4:31 pm
Les, I trust you have checked activeCollab, haven't you?
Created by Berislav Lopac on 12.03.2007 4:49 pm
Yes, we use AC for a number of internal projects. We like AC but I'm surprised its really the only self-hosted solution atm. There are others but they are in a different price range and much more corporate in nature.
Created by Les on 12.03.2007 4:52 pm
Hey, it's nice to see that such a small project from these neck of the woods has gathered this much following.
And for alternatives, I've always wanted to check FogBugz as a project management solution; it might not be for everyone, though, as it's focused on software projects.
Created by Berislav Lopac on 12.03.2007 4:57 pm
I agree Les. The only exception I have to that rule currently is that I just started using FogBugz and I went with the hosted version after previous failures at actually getting it installed. So far it's OK and I mostly use it as a list of todo's so it's not a big deal. If UserScape expanded with more developers I'd definitely move it off their servers.
I also left off further ranting on saas since I've done it here before....
Created by Ian on 12.03.2007 5:13 pm
Interesting that all of their points are related to how convenient it is for them but none about what the customer wants.
Created by Tony Edgecombe on 12.04.2007 4:04 am
Yeah, that's what struck me as well.
Created by Ian on 12.04.2007 9:27 am