A dirty little secret of SaaS

Stan Beer
Sunday, 01 October 2006 20:19

Opinion and Analysis

Once again, I'm writing this little article on Google's online wordprocessor Writely. I think it's a great little application and I actually prefer using it to Microsoft Word. However, Writely, like all SaaS (software as a service) applications, has a dirty little secret.

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Actually, it's not really a secret because on some level we all know about it but not many of the of the SaaS vendors talk about it much - what do you do if you're offline?

Off course, wireless connectivity is becoming almost ubiquitous across many major cities, making it easier to stay online outside of the office. However, there are still plenty of situations where workers out in the field can't connect to the net, such as long domestic and international flights for instance.

Writely, like many other SaaS applications, allows you to save documents in a range of offline formats, including Word and OpenOffice. That's great, so all you need to do is install Word on your notebook and make sure that you save all your Writely docs as Word docs. Presumably, you could do the same with all your other SaaS applications - just save a copy to a compatible offline equivalent.

Hey hang on just a minute. Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of SaaS?  Yes well, let's not talk about that. Your executive can spend eight hours watching inflight movies and getting loaded instead of going through sales reports, customer profiles and whatever else it is that busy executives normally do with their notebooks on planes.

According to Gartner, by 2011 about 25% of all applications will be SaaS. If that is to become an accurate projection, then the internet had better become truly ubiquitous - even on planes. Meanwhile, I still need to keep a copy of Word for when I go on the road.