Consumers and businesses are very different as customers. Every consumer product/service is fundamentally an experience; even the design of Apple's packaging is carefully engineered so that you feel a certain way as you open the box. That's because consumers are buying your product (or sitting through your advertisements, or giving you their personal data) because you gratify some emotional need they have; why else would they use it?

Businesses have only two fundamental needs: save money or make money (where time=money, if you can point to a wage rate). Every B2B business model is based around those. Many failed entrepreneurs have looked at the sucky user-experience of most enterprise software, said "I can do better than that", promptly done better than that...and found out that they didn't make any money, because the person doing the purchasing didn't give a damn what the "experience" is like, the whole reason they pay their employees is so that they'll sit through tasks that they hate. If you can't frame your B2B company's value propositions as "This will save $X" or "This will make $X", you won't sell.

But these days the employees who work in HR, finance, accounts receivable spend their downtime locked into very sophisticated, mobile-friendly apps with user interfaces we could only dream of in past - even while slumped in front of the TV.

They know what good software looks like.

Yes, sometimes the suits making the decisions will just go from form and mandate SAP.

But I can assure you that much of the time, turning up to demo your product will go badly for you if it looks like a drab table-based web site from the 90s.

Conversely a single magnificent d3 animation will move you straight to the short list.

I've seen multi-million dollar software deals where the "make or break" feature is themeing it to corporate colors. I've also seen some terrible software bought because the sales team takes the manager out to a nice lunch.

I don't think I've ever seen software sold on a purely cost/savings basis.

The mistake those people make is focusing on the user and end result for the enterprise using it. The customer isn't either of these -- it's the exec.

Businesses make lots of emotional decisions... the continued, although diminished, existence of IBM is proof of that. It's just harder to divine whose emotions matter and what moves them. You also need the capital to survive that learning experience.

SaE is when, instead of buying online with a credit card, you are courted by attractive sales people and consultants, get wined and dined, receive beautiful reports to show your boss, get a nice pen and a bottle of wine perhaps, and participate in workshops facilitated by said attractive consultants. This makes you feel like an important person in charge of an important project.

If anything, with the growth of self serve products like AWS and the growing popularity of OSS, we're still in the process of moving away from your "experience-based" service to regular SaaS.

Also-- aren't video games already an example of Software as an Experience?

Espresso made with poor quality coffee (bad roast, crappy beans, roasted too long ago, incorrect grind, etc) is going to be just as gross as diner drip.

Another thing to consider is: you can make drip manually, whereby you control the drip rate, total quantity, and water temperature. Not all drip is automatic.

Acidity is a big bugaboo for me and I tend to take my coffee as either mocha or with two cream, one sugar.

They were non-union and in a rural area where wages were lower. The price was lower than buying everything individually and the Big 3 saved lots of money on their very high labor costs.

What's to stop people from doing a roll up, buying a bunch of litle SaaS companies and offering a package that is a complete solution? It would be discounted of course like MS Office back in the day which killed off the category leaders like Lotus 123, dBase and WordPerfect.

That is a far more plausible scenario than what this guy proposes.

Also this, obviously: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/18/clayton...

There is a very slight product difference in any luxury experience. It adds to the experience after all. However this is meaningless in the overall comparison. You don't drink drip coffee anymore because you love the other experience. It's obviously not "gross" because you were drinking it just fine before you were exposed to espresso. Maybe at some point you'll become disillusioned in being a coffee snob and then go back to drip. It happens.

This isn't unique to you or coffee. You could say pretty much exactly the same thing about whatever brands/hobbies I'm into and I'd feel exactly like you do: that my preference was justified by more than pure emotional connection. In reality, our choices as consumers are 90% emotional, which is why advertising works so well after all.

Sometimes one just doesn't realize how crappy the previous version was until one tries the new one.

Espresso is as different to filter coffee as icecream is to milk. They're different products, made with different material mix and different processes, different roasts, different grind size, different bean choice. They're two different things.

An espresso can't be better than filter coffee any more than an apple can be better than an orange.

All of which is irrelevant to the question of whether it's just snobbery or not, which was what I was discussing.

Beware over-training your ability to discern differences. Such subtlety might give you an advantage in some fields... or it might remove your ability to enjoy basic food and drink.

More and more SaaS products offer Facebook groups, Meetups, Slack channels, conferences, and more for their users.

Community is a way for SaaS co's to create network effect, and it may lead to consolidation.

At some point it makes economic sense to roll out your own data center. At some point it makes economic sense to design and make your own server and networking equipment. The question would be where that breaking point is for SaaS.

You can order coffee at a cheap restaurant in the US for $1!?

You guys seriously don't know how good you have it.

According to this 2015 article, the cheapest macdonalds coffee here was $2.60 USD. And no, we don't get paid more.

Hardware spec wise, the price of a Macbook is probably double that of a regular laptop with equivalent specs (CPU, Memory, GPU, Disk, etc). But people buy those Macs for the experience; not just the specs.