Remember when there was no "cloud" and just locally executing software with local persistence?
I want very much to return to that. There are a few use cases for me, personally, where SaaS / "the cloud" makes sense but for 99% of what I use a computer for, I want local only. I don't want my application to require an active Internet connection. I don't want it sending data to someone else's computer. Probably most importantly, I don't want the software that I pay for to change on me without my direct opt-in.
The fact that we have articles about offline-first, cloud is "optional" is hilarious when this was just normal every day software only a few short years ago. I can't stand how trend-happy our industry is. "The Cloud" and "SaaS" solved a few problems for a few people ... but we went all in as if there were no alternatives and those of us who don't require mobility and would prefer that we can choose when to "upgrade" and what data to "share" were left behind.
I fondly remember locally-executing software with local persistence by default.
To provide a counterpoint, though, during that time my entire family shared one desktop PC. Looking around me, right now: work macbook, personal linux laptop, smartphone, steam deck. I suspect that the workflows that were "fine" in 1995 would really wear on me today. Especially the ones that involve migrating documents from place-to-place for collaboration while trying to maintain a canonical master copy somehow.
Today, because of de-facto reliance on the cloud, "setting up" a new machine - regardless of its OS - takes me about 20 minutes. If my laptop fell off of my bike, that would suck, but I wouldn't irretrievably lose important data.
There are downsides to the current cloud-first paradigm too, of course. But I don't think it's _all_ downside.
I never migrated the majority of what I do to "the cloud" and I have multiple devices, laptops etc. in my house. Setting up a new Linux install takes me about 20 minutes. Wouldn't know about Windows. Then again, I probably use way fewer "services" / "apps" than most people. It's funny, I've always been a very tech savvy computer nerd. I've developed software for a living for 25 years. But the older I get and the more the industry changes the less I find I use "modern tech" as a consumer.
I'm also not thinking back to 1995. This all started, in my memory, following the "mobile revolution" at the tail-end of the 00s. That's when more and more software that I use every day stopped selling perpetual licenses and started charging monthly subscriptions. Everything went "mobile first" and "cloud first" and it got more and more persistent as the 2010s went on.
On a positive note, there is some software that used to be inaccessible due to price, like Avid's Pro Tools, that I can now afford thanks to the switch in pricing models.
But even if it took me an entire weekend to set up a new device, I think that I would still prefer that over needing literally everything to have Internet access. It removes the control from me, the user, and places it in the hands of "the corporation." They can change the software without my consent. They can suffer outages (to be fair we can have local hardware failures too but it's under my control which makes a difference). I remember almost returning my PS4 when it required me to connect it to the Internet just to be able to use it on first boot.
> But the older I get and the more the industry changes the less I find I use "modern tech" as a consumer.
It may be a "get out of my lawn!!" reaction, but I find modern software distasteful.
I want to use software that enable me to invent and do nice things. Not software that locks me in a pre-designed process. Even if most of the time I don't go inventing, and if the pre-designed process is nice, that difference still sores me.
You aren't alone. Open ended systems are usually far more powerful and interesting than rigid ones. I need an extremely compelling reason to even consider picking up a new online-only/saas or similar tool.
Investing time and energy into a tool that can be ruined or lost at any point in the future, or might turn out to be too limited, is a huge risk. It doesn't take getting burned too many times to start getting a lot more wary.
I suspect preferences will hinge on peoples' budgets for personal responsibility. As my non-digital responsibilities have increased, I've found it nice to be able to delegate to "the cloud" - even at the loss of independence & control.
If there were a personally-owned "cloud" setup, I would prefer that. A box that plugs into my fiber connection and provides the equivalents of the cloud services I use, with data stored locally and backed up automatically to a secure server. A man can dream.
Such a thing exists, but building and maintaining that come at a pretty high cost to your personal time. There’s very little that we do in the cloud that doesn’t have an on-prem (at home) equivalent. You could even rent servers at a CoLo or something and provide yourself regional resiliency, etc.
There's no reason why it should come at a pretty high cost to one's personal time, though. A plug-and-play box with a well-defined API for storage and sync is not an insurmountable engineering problem. The economics of it is why we don't have one, yet.
Hear hear. I often dream of having a home setup with everything but my web browser blocked from accessing the internet, and exception granted as they are necessary.
Alas, that's a pipe dream because of the way things work now, and I don't necessarily want to inflict a luddite lifestyle on my wife and children. But the allure is still there to setup some crackpot scheme that will keep me from idly pulling out my phone to check whatever just because my brain is idle for 5 seconds.
I keep seeing this argument here but I just don't buy it. Most companies don't want to operate all the infrastructure they need to run their core workloads. Managed cloud services are such a massive boon to small to medium sized companies. They're great even for large companies for many scenarios.
The irony of many libraries and frameworks trying to recreate the offline-first syncing and replication that Lotus Notes had more or less solved should be better known.
Bonus points for the irony of LotusScript being ECMAScript, which is also JavaScript.
Oh, and Notes generating the native app as a web app natively was pretty fluttery.
I have to stop, because I can no longer remember why people were switching away from Notes so furiously. And there was probably a good reason like IIS.
NotesSQL was a great little ODBC driver to make relational db calls from the NoSQL backend of Notes. Many folks owe their sharpness in the universal standards of ANSI SQL to get data ported to MySQL.
Absolute rubbish. The proliferation of SaaS has been absolutely huge for business productivity, in fact, I would argue that my professional services business doesn't exist at anywhere near its profitability without it.
> I don't want my application to require an active Internet connection. I don't want it sending data to someone else's computer. Probably most importantly, I don't want the software that I pay for to change on me without my direct opt-in.
What software specifically? How to collaborate on literally anything business wise without a internet connection?! Now, is there a case for offline software? ABSOLUTELY. But to call this whole thing a fad and a trend is absurdly disingenuous.
EDIT:
Just saw your reply below:
I have multiple devices, laptops etc. in my house. Setting up a new Linux install takes me about 20 minutes. Wouldn't know about Windows. Then again, I probably use way fewer "services" / "apps" than most people. It's funny, I've always been a very tech savvy computer nerd. I've developed software for a living for 25 years. But the older I get and the more the industry changes the less I find I use "modern tech" as a consumer.
Ahhh makes more sense, you're a developer. I get that YOU might not need SaaS tools, but this is a very myopic take.
You realize I was speaking for myself, right? I never once said that SaaS doesn't provide any value to anyone.
But you need to understand that even as a self-employed business owner (product company, not contractor btw) for 15 years, I didn't take advantage of many SaaS tools at all.
Collaboration is niche. B2B productivity tools are a big industry (ironically I actually work for a company that makes a popular B2B collaborative SaaS product) but in the global scheme of things it's still a narrow niche when you consider the broad field of computing and software in general. Not everyone needs to be mobile, not everyone needs to collaborate. There are loads of software applications that can be local only, but there are few options because of the way our industry works.
And your post is timely because I was just thinking to myself this morning about how the biases that are introduced by Product Owners who come up with these ideas in work-related contexts, even if they are not the POs of B2B or "collaborative" software, still permeate non-B2B, non-"collaborative" software. They are in "work mode" and so they tend to think in terms of "How do I interact with this software. What do I need?" rather than actually considering the use cases for their every day users.
Take gaming, for example. Multi-player gaming is quite popular and those who seek it out ought to have options there. BUT ... I stopped gaming in large part because the industry went all in on online multiplayer and single player gaming options became more difficult to find. It's not that they don't exist anymore, it's just that I don't want a console that requires an Internet connection to play a story-based game like The Last of Us.
It's the following that pisses me off:
- The "all or nothing" mentality of our industry
- The ability for companies to change software that I use and pay for without me being able to decide if it's worth "upgrading" or not
- The lack of choices
I think it's pretty rich that we're both accusing each other of the same thing. You made the argument that because collaborative B2B tools are useful in a business context that it is "myopic" of me to want something that doesn't cater to that niche. I can make the exact same argument right back at you.
>>> but we went all in as if there were no alternatives and those of us who don't require mobility and would prefer that we can choose when to "upgrade" and what data to "share" were left behind
> You realize I was speaking for myself, right?
So "us" is just you? Your "us" is a very small minority, which is the point of the people who are responding to you.
I personally like that these days my biggest concern about a computer suddenly dying on me, or getting lost/stolen, or a drive failing is the cost of replacing it. Pretty much any important data to me is painlessly synced and it takes some amount stress out of my life knowing that I have basically no chance of losing data.
You hit the crux though: collaboration. If your product's essence is collaboration you'll need to support this, but if it's an enhancement the local experience is often so much better, and we can solve the connectivity part on the side.
>> People are used to things being in the cloud already. And I am not talking about tech people.
Most people use their phones for almost everything, and this is almost all local execution, local persistence and huge amounts of cloud-based collaboration. I wish desktops were on this trajectory.
We have articles about offline-first, cloud-optional software because those articles are primarily discussing tools written using web technology (HTML and Javascript) and often running in your web browser.
I work on my documents on my computer, my phone and my iPad.
My IDE is hosted in AWS Cloud 9 most of the time because I travel a lot and while my internet may be spotty, it’s good enough to connect to the hosted environment and I get full speed internet between my IDE and the Internet when I need to download something to it (packages, Docker containers, etc)
My photos and videos automatically get backed up to iCloud, Google Drive, Amazon Drive and OneDrive.
If I dropped my phone into the ocean, I can go to the Apple Store, buy a new phone and it’s just like having my old one.
I agree with this in spirit, but there are many advantages to a services model. However, building services is exceptionally complicated. I'm building a simple platform which people can run at home or in cloud. I have an unlisted tech talk dry run https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWYgChA_aYA
I will almost always choose to use the web app over downloading a client onto my system. Keeps things clean. The exception is when the web app quality sucks.
I’m sympathetic to your point but most apps I regularly use require internet anyways.
Remember when there was no "cloud" and just locally executing software with local persistence?
I want very much to return to that. There are a few use cases for me, personally, where SaaS / "the cloud" makes sense but for 99% of what I use a computer for, I want local only. I don't want my application to require an active Internet connection. I don't want it sending data to someone else's computer. Probably most importantly, I don't want the software that I pay for to change on me without my direct opt-in.
The fact that we have articles about offline-first, cloud is "optional" is hilarious when this was just normal every day software only a few short years ago. I can't stand how trend-happy our industry is. "The Cloud" and "SaaS" solved a few problems for a few people ... but we went all in as if there were no alternatives and those of us who don't require mobility and would prefer that we can choose when to "upgrade" and what data to "share" were left behind.