I worked there a long time ago. Indian VPs were taking kickbacks from consulting firms to hire their devs, it was an open secret. Whole divisions of the company are 95% Indian.
I wont expose the group here, but there's a broad network of technology directors from Amex, that have all been hiring and promoting eachother for 20 years. Very tight nit networks of nepotism, in some cases, brother and sister working together
All that really matters is the Amex brand, and so all the tech was considered back office, and unimportant.
Also, once a company enters some kind of monopoly status, very little matters in the quality of their product.
Amex has less than 10% worldwide market share and is a distant 4th behimd unionpay, visa, mc. I don't see the monopoly here.
I have to say I was relieved when my Amex card issuer switched to visa because owning an Amex is a pita. I think they build their business on various rewards programs, the brand itself is garbage in my eyes.
This happened to the company I worked for also. Blatant corruption. One Indian guy gets appointed to VP, then almost immediately all their reporting chain is Indian. Managers are told they can only hire from some obscure Indian staffing company (that the VP has a stake in or gets bribed to use). Quality is garbage cause no self respecting Indian dev would work for them.
Zero pushback from exec level, zero acknowledgment even though it's obvious. Very deflating for employees.
This happens everywhere. The bigger difference here is that most in this board identify with white anglosaxan, so when they bring in their peers you build the false illusion that if you work hard you will join the club. heh. you won't.
Yeah I think people need to start asking the question, "Where is the money going". Its not just inexistent, its literally going somewhere other than your pocket.
They're not voting against their own self interest; they just have different interests than you. Their primary interest and goal is making sure their out-group is hurting, and that is what they are voting for, regardless of that happens to them.
how dont people understand? if you have a VC funded b2b saas, you need to charge huge margins for the investors to get a return. now, small teams can vibe code a replacement and charge 90% less money. AI is going to kill saas margins.
i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas
Did vanilla Jira for a while, battled with a web app that is actively trying to make you hate it—switched our team to Linear, couldn't be happier ever since.
Well for marketing and sales your bigger competitor is already doing the work of showing companies that they want the functionality at all, and the cheaper competitor's sales and marketing pitch can be: we are much cheaper.
This is pretty much what blacksmith.sh does -- GitHub Actions but it's on faster and cheaper hardware. I'm sure they spend non-trivial amounts on marketing but "X but much cheaper" doesn't sound like a difficult sale.
(edit) And the design, sadly, can be as simple as "rip-off bigger competitor" -- of course if one day you are the big competitor because you "won" in the market, you'll need to invest in design, but by then I guess you'll have the money?
they dont, which is why these companies are going to get smoked. a small team of people will compete with atlassian head on. the whole saas business model is under threat
Yeah.... The code isn't the hard part. That's not where the value is.
This hard part when you're doing in house stuff is getting a good spec, ongoing support, and long term maintenance.
I've gone trough development of a module with a stakeholder, got a whole spec, confirmed it, coded it, launched it, and was then told it didn't work at all like what they needed. It was literally what they told me... I've said 'yes we can make that report, what specific fields do you need' and gotten blank stares.
Even if you're lucky and the original stakeholder and the code are on the same page, as soon as you get a coworkers 'wouldnt it be nice if...' you're going to have a bad day if it's hand coded, vibecoded, or outsourced...
This has always been the problem, it's why no-code never _really_ worked, even if the tech was perfectly functional.
Software will be easy to create, which will kill moats and margins on existing products. The game is up for pure saas. Smart money started pricing this in one year ago
For a lot of SaaS firms, a big part of their value is the domain knowledge and best practices encoded in the software.
Current AIs often do a bad job of that. Sure, they know a lot of it. But they also get a lot of it wrong, and can’t tell the difference between genuinely good advice, and advice that sounds good but is practically worthless or even harmful.
(Of course I’m biased since I work for a SaaS firm. But I’m talking about them in general, not just my current employer.)
I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect AIs to get detailed hands-on domain knowledge. A lot of this stuff humans learn by doing and by experience. AI models don't learn anything by doing and experience. A model vendor can't possibly encode all that experience into their training data, and even if they try, the problem is a lot of it will be vertical-specific, country/region-specific, and it is forever changing. SaaS firms have professional services and sales consulting teams who are constantly talking to customers about their actual business problems, and they feed that accumulated wisdom back to product management and data science, who in turn help engineering encode it into the product.
From what I've personally seen in SaaS AI agent development – if you try to build an AI agent to give customers advice in a particular business domain, you need to do a huge amount of work validating the answer quality with actual domain experts, and adjusting the prompts / RAG documents / tool design / etc to make sure it is giving genuinely useful advice. It is really easy to build a system which generates output which sounds superficially good, but an actual domain expert will consider wrong or worthless.
Was the hard part ever really the software, though? It's the Service part of SaaS that seems to provide the moat. Lock-in, habits, workflows, integrations, and trust. And don't discount the appeal of making some part of your operations "someone else's problem." Could you hire engineers or use an LLM to make your own Google Docs? Probably, yeah, but would that be worth the headache of being responsible for a bespoke internal document system?
You might think you can, for a while. Been there, done that. But you probably can not do so sustainably in most cases. Even if you could, would you really be better off building vs. buying? Outsourcing development, operations, and maintenance is almost always the better choice, letting you focus on the things you do uniquely, differentiably, or meaningfully better.
"We have this awesome internal version of Docs that we're responsible for fixing, upgrading, and doing support for" is not the flex "AI can code anything!" aficionados think it is. Especially when you also have similar internal versions of Sheets, Jira, Slack, GitHub, Linux, Postgres, and 100 other tools.
Making your own Google Docs is stupid unless your company's core business is document management.
OTOH Replacing SAP with a bespoke system will make a lot of sense for many companies.
SAP is already the worst of both worlds. It'll have been highly customized for your flow so you've got all of the headaches of bespoke software and all of the headaches of SaaS. And unlike Google Docs, it'll be highly integral to your core business.
Companies pay millions and millions to get away from bespoke software, but not simply because of the costs. Companies want to do their core business, they don't want to also be a software enterprise, and assume all the risks that entails. Even if AI makes creating software 10 times less expensive, that doesn't really change.
you are aware of the long history of organizations being absolutely screwed by bad erp implementations right? nike's 2001 issue, the horrific birmingham oracle implementation, avon, etc.
the problem is an AI can figure out habits and workflows pretty seamlessly. lock-in is artificial and loses power when it's really easy to make a competing app for large swaths of web apps.
integration is likely the most valuable part of the puzzle, but it's also prone to disruption
I think all that's left are like <50 apps each with their own very bespoke and "power user"-ready interface
Even then, I would expect most orgs would want to contract out to a company that manages an instance of that open source software. That management company could undercut bigger players because they don't need as many engineers working on features. I don't see where the LLM comes in and shifts the calculus here.
Can't wait for every hospital to create their own patient record system, every accounting office to create their own accounting software, every car service to create their own timebooking solution, etc.
I wont expose the group here, but there's a broad network of technology directors from Amex, that have all been hiring and promoting eachother for 20 years. Very tight nit networks of nepotism, in some cases, brother and sister working together
All that really matters is the Amex brand, and so all the tech was considered back office, and unimportant.
Also, once a company enters some kind of monopoly status, very little matters in the quality of their product.
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