They didnt, dont make the mistake of thinking Saas companies are just software companies. They are Sales companies who happen to sell software. Companies like Dropbox & Atlassian have long been surpassed in Tech but they live only because they continue selling even when demand was hard to get. Their moat is sales & networking and software has to be just good enough. And other part is service, these companies still have one of best costumer service since the start of early 2010s. You can still get refund on Uber quite easily, but if you try doing that at a regular old school company you would require a prayer and couple of business weeks.
Good point, sales is the winning factor in most cases. Why is Microsoft one of the largest software companies? Sales.
The problem with SaaS is that it's like the early dotcom era where you took a crackpot idea, added "...but on the internet" and it was worth $100mil until it wasn't. SaaS is more like... dBase III application, but with a pretty web UI and on the internet... and instead of hiring a person to do this work you using manual processes you can pay us 9x the cost of that but if you act now you can like it in at 6x the cost for the next 36 months with a 96 month commitment.
Nah it's not that at all. Most of the services are totally fungible and everyone has a short attention span. You need to be in a market which is extremely difficult to disrupt and have a product which people are totally dependent on. And those tend to have a rather large cost to enter unless you were in early.
That 2nd S is sometimes engineered into the product design to maximize vendor lock in, and consulting revenue.
Yes and that is exactly why they are losing. They have hostages not customers.
Re:AI Is Killing B2B SaaS
by colechristensen on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @03:47PM
(#46891510)
I just don't want to pay $50/user/month for an initially open source product that was relicensed and then crippled that the initial group giving something away decided they wanted to make a business of it.
Why not, if it solves your problem?
Re:AI Is Killing B2B SaaS
by sarchertech on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @04:43PM
(#46892229)
Use the original open source version. They can’t relicense anything they can just use a new license for future versions.
> it's quality, availability, price, etc.
Are you sure? Companies still use SharePoint Online, Teams etc.
The F in SharePoint stands for fast
Yes, many don't like Sharepoint, but still they use it. It's the tool they can use.
Customers don't care if Sharepoint uses LLM, they just want to share ideas, files, reports, pages, etc. If LLM makes it easier, great! If some other product makes it easier, great!
It's not about the product it's about the results.
You're proving the point? Sharepoint, teams: availability + price. Every company has microflows, sharepoint and teams are automatically available and part of the price or lower priced than the competition.
You missed quality and the price isn't that cheap
When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them.
AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S.
Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc.
Service providers do care about the first S, software makes servicing so much more scalable. You define the service once and then enable it to happen again and again.