Re:Time to rebuild the web?
by LoSboccacc on Monday April 16, 2018 @05:13PM
(#16852833)
> It's all about making more profitS
This part is blatantly wrong. Saas enable on demand consumption and lowers tco by a great deal, i.e. indesign used to be 700$ each release, that now covers you 3 years of subscription and you don’t have to fear obsolescence.
Same with many many other software. Once you factor in obsolescence and upgrade cycles it’s very hard to keep the position of saas being more expensive.
The other point about losing control of your own stack do remain valid.
I don't see how any western capitalist society couldn't fall into this trend. It's all about making more profits, no different from say buying some land with natural water sources, close it to the public, bottling the water then sell bottles. All perfectly legal and fine, until the day there's no more competition and whoever owns that land raises the prices so that some people cannot afford water anymore. That day ten people dead of thirst or shot by guards while trespassing won't make a difference when a thousand of them still can pay for that water. Still perfectly legal although not fine at all, but capitalism as we know it has no moral limitations. It's not just turning software into service being dangerous, but also what happens next.
And of course the total loss of control of our data. Lawyers using cloud services and social media for exchanging sensitive documents and discussing them may seem crazy, but I've already seen some doing exactly that. Being ignorant about the implications of today's technologies misuse can have disastrous effects.