Posted on 2024-08-08
I'm still amazed at the state of modern businesses, particularly with how reliant they are upon Software as a Service (SaaS) tools for the most basic things. It reminds me of a sketch I once saw where a person goes to a store to buy things for... something. I don't remember. The person picks up expensive and unnecessary items, justifies that they definitely need them, and put them in their cart.
Then they're surprised at the cost.
This is what it feels like whenever I look at the ridiculous array of tools modern companies have and how many of them do the exact same things with maybe a slightly different coat of paint.
You can see how this happens. Let's say you're starting a business that makes some software product. What do you really need? Well, obviously you need email. That's a given. So you buy a subscription to Google Workspace or maybe Microsoft 365, both of which sound like great bargains since they provide email, calendars, IM and video conferencing tools, storage, and even office suites. For the price, that's a bargain.
But wait. You don't like Google Chat. It's clunky and it doesn't have many built-in connections to other software. You've always had bad experiences with it in the past. You've used Slack, though. Slack's great. It connects to everything, it's got a nice interface, it scales nicely. Into the cart it goes.
What next? Well, you make software. You need a software forge. You don't want to self-host it because it's your bread and butter. If the forge goes down, everything goes with it, so you need to hand that risk off to specialists rather than trusting it to your small team (who already have more than enough to do). You take a look and settle on something like GitHub or GitLab. You have a forge with automated CI and lots of great hooks and connections. Into the cart!
Hang on, that's right. Your project manager hates GitHub. GitHub issues is really limited, even with projects enabled. And the wiki software is too technical for most people who aren't developer-adjacent. They don't want to learn Markdown. The PM recommends Jira, since this gives them a really flexible suite of tools for project management plus wiki software (Confluence) that's heavily WYSIWYG.
I could go on, but you get the picture. These companies just keep piling things into the cart and then at some point they look at the bill and wonder where the hell the money's going. Every quarter some team requests some new tool to make their workflow more efficient. Each time, it's another monthly cost of x dollars per user. These costs add up quickly, and shave down margins. In a large company, it's probably not that big an issue. But for small companies, these costs can be really hard to bear.
I got thinking recently about those infomercials I used to see at garden centers in the UK. I have no idea why they only played there, but that's the only place I ever saw them. They would advertise products like an onion dicer that got it perfect each time, or "the last pan you'll ever need". You know the kind of thing. I never bought any of these products, but I've often found myself thinking about similar things when I chop an onion or peel a potato. Wouldn't it be so much easier with a specialist tool?
But then I stopped myself. I realised I've never actually owned a good set of knives. All the knives I've ever owned were cheap or just came with the house. They have always been crappy and frustrating; chopping and peeling with them sucked. Does that mean, then, that I need to supplement them with every specialist salad shredding utensil I see? No. It means I need to buy and learn to care for a set of good, solid knives.
The same goes for businesses. You really can do a huge amount with a very small number of tools. Given a nice interface (like Sourcehut[1]), you really can use email for most anything I've described above. It's a communications tool, a project management system, and a distributed patch management system. Just like the good knives are a fundamental part of a kitchen that you can add to if needed, so too is email the fundament of a solid business.
Over time, we've lost our ability to learn things like email. Just like people don't tend to know how to sharpen knives any more, so too have people lost the ability and willingness to learn their email client fully and really see what it can do. I encourage everyone to really take a look at what email can do and take the time to get to know it a bit better. You may find yourself looking at these SaaS solutions a bit differently.