For years, software companies have sold us a simple promise: convenience.
Software as a Service, or SaaS, was supposed to free
ordinary people and businesses from the headaches of maintaining their own
systems. No servers to manage. No installations to babysit. No need to keep a
technician on staff just to make the email work. You would pay a monthly or
annual fee, log in, and the service would take care of the rest.
Somewhere along the way, a strange inversion took place.
We got Software as a Burden: SaaB.
SaaB is what happens when the service you pay for begins
assigning you work.
You subscribe to an email provider because you want email.
Then one morning you receive an automated warning informing you that your SPF
record is wrong. Perhaps your DKIM needs attention. Maybe your domain appears
to exist in the wrong data center. Someone, or some automated system somewhere,
is apparently trying to claim ownership of a domain you have owned for years.
Suddenly you are no longer a customer. You are an unpaid
junior systems administrator.
You open the DNS settings at your domain registrar. You
learn the difference between TXT, MX and CNAME records. You discover that
multiple TXT records are perfectly fine, except when two of them happen to be
SPF records. You compare .com with .eu. You wait for DNS propagation. You take
screenshots. You reply to a support ticket that may or may not ever have
involved a human being.
Two hours later, the email works again.
Probably.
AND YOU PAID FOR THIS EXPERIENCE.
This is one of the peculiar features of modern digital life.
We have outsourced increasingly complicated systems to companies precisely
because we do not want to operate them ourselves, while those same companies
increasingly outsource the last mile of technical administration back to us.
The customer becomes the integration layer.
It is not limited to email. A payment processor suddenly
requires reverification. A social media platform locks an account after
detecting “unusual activity” caused by its own security systems. A cloud
application changes authentication procedures. An advertising account develops
a permissions problem. A subscription silently renews. An app stops recognizing
Face ID and asks you to authenticate again through a sequence of devices, codes
and recovery methods.
Each incident is individually defensible.
Security matters. Authentication matters. DNS standards
matter. Fraud prevention matters.
The absurdity emerges in aggregate.
A person can now spend a significant portion of a working
day performing maintenance on services whose entire commercial justification is
that they eliminate maintenance.
And the burden is not distributed evenly. Large companies
employ IT departments. Small businesses, freelancers, families and ordinary
consumers often have no such buffer. The person writing the invoices, doing the
client work or managing the household is also expected to understand domain
authentication, cloud permissions, billing systems, password managers,
two-factor authentication and whatever new administrative layer appeared during
the last software update.
The more technology is supposed to simplify life, the more
technological housekeeping accumulates around it.
Subscriptions make the irritation worse because they change
the psychological contract.
When software was purchased once, some inconvenience felt
like a property of the tool. You bought it, installed it and occasionally dealt
with it.
A subscription is different. The customer is continuously
paying.
The implicit bargain is not merely access to software. It is
access to a functioning service. That distinction matters. If I pay every month
for someone else to operate the infrastructure, I reasonably expect not to be
recruited periodically to operate the infrastructure myself.
Yet SaaS companies have become extremely good at monetizing
continuity while externalizing maintenance. The payment is automated; the
troubleshooting is not.
There is also something oddly asymmetrical about modern
support systems. A computer can create a problem instantly. A fraud-detection
algorithm can block an account in milliseconds. An automated monitoring system
can send an alarming email at 3:17 a.m.
But resolving the problem may require a human customer to
search documentation, navigate several administrative consoles, take
screenshots, alter settings and wait twenty-four business hours for another
human, assuming a human ever enters the process.
Automation works beautifully in one direction, but the
inconvenience remains manual.
This is not an argument against cloud software. SaaS has
delivered enormous benefits. Most people genuinely do not want to host their
own email server, maintain accounting software locally or manage physical
infrastructure.
The problem is that the industry often measures simplicity
at the moment of signup rather than across the lifetime of the relationship.
Signing up is effortless. Leaving is complicated.
Paying is effortless. Correcting a billing problem is
complicated.
Connecting a domain is presented as effortless. Understanding
why it stopped working three years later is complicated.
Perhaps software companies need a new metric: customer
maintenance hours.
How many hours per year does the average paying customer
spend keeping your supposedly managed service operational?
Not learning advanced features. Not doing productive work
with the product: maintaining access to the thing they already paid for!
That number might reveal more about product quality than
another dashboard showing engagement, retention or monthly recurring revenue.
The best technology increasingly feels invisible. It works.
It remembers its configuration. It warns users in plain language. When
something genuinely technical goes wrong, the company diagnoses it instead of
handing the customer a vocabulary lesson in internet infrastructure.
The future of good software may not be software that does
more. It may be software that demands less.
Until then, many of us will continue paying monthly fees for
the privilege of receiving occasional surprise assignments from our own tools.
Software as a Service promised to eliminate the IT
department.
Software as a Burden simply moved the IT department into
the customer.
