Because of the main advantages of SaaS: recurring payments and data lock-in.

Adobe achieves that with desktop apps, if you can call it an achievement.

Achievement is a big word here. They had to shove it down people's throats with a bloated, buggy, and expensive app suite.

Yes although people still put their hand in their pocket every month so they must be getting some value from it.

Sadly I am not Adobe

Scaling out cross-platform, lower cost of investment to support multiple OS/Devices.

User does not need to worry about dependencies and libraries - they just need to make sure they're running a somewhat up-to-date version of a modern browser.

Users are not tied to a single device either.

As a business, it's not to your advantage to have to ask permission from app store owners. The web does not require permission from a third-party that may decide to compete with you.

But with the app stores you get more users

I basically had no users for one of my desktop apps for seven years, till I ported it to mobile and put it in the normal app store

Here's PG's response from 2001: http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

I think he is saying that because with webapps you have

- control over your software and updates

- no one can pirate your software/service

How do you have more "control over your software" with a web app? With a native app, I can do virtually anything. With a web app, I can really only do what (Google ∩ Apple ∩ Microsoft)'s web browser teams decided to prioritize, and allow, and optimize.

As for 'pirating', is that a serious concern these days? I've only ever heard about it being an issue at big companies selling software to other big companies, where it's solved with "license servers".

I think they mean rapid, continuous deployment. If it’s a web app you can push out changes every day to near universal adoption. With a native app you have to cajole users to update

There are auto-updaters for desktop software, too.

Also on mobile you are constrained by the app store requirements as well.

This is exactly what I meant.

>> How do you have more "control over your software" with a web app?

It means they can break a program I'm using at any moment they wish, even after I paid for it.

I think pirating is a serious issue in other countries (i.e mine), I practically never saw anyone actually pay for any office suite, adobe software and some offline games. All of them get pirated and very quickly too.

> no one can pirate your software/service

Huh? Given how most web applications these days are using client-side rendering there's nothing stopping someone from just downloading all of the frontend assets. You can also connect to a server from your desktop application so I don't understand how desktop makes it easier to pirate anything.

Web applications have lots of essential parts on the server-side even if they do client-side rendering. And each paying user is logged in when using it, so the company can accept/deny requests depending on the user.

Proprietary desktop applications are usually downloaded after a payment, and then the full software is available locally. By hacking the security parts of it one can then have a totally free version and distribute it. That's why it is easier to pirate.

How does this address my point about being able to connect to a server from your desktop application? Just because historically companies have not deployed their product in such a fashion doesn't mean it isn't technically possible. How do you think social mobile applications work? Have you ever worked on an application that wasn't running in a browser?

> That's why it is easier to pirate.

There are no technical reasons why a desktop application is inherently easier to pirate. Only implementation details.

Not anymore!

Games and even productivity apps are known to be moving small pieces to their servers so that you cannot run the entire application on your own...