Social Glass

Joe McKendrick over at the FASTForwardBlog had a great post about the generous tolerance levels us users seem to have with SaaS products. In it he compares the high standards we’ve come to expect with “thick-client” software and how those standards are relaxed a bit with the “thin-client”, or client-server, approach . And I quote:

We’re still enamored by the flexibility and simplicity of the Web 2.0 and SaaS models, and I’ll take them any day over the CD packs and installation headaches of old. But it’s time to start holding vendors’ feet to the fire over the quality of these services being delivered, just as we did in the days of old. Whether the code is inside our machines or out in the cloud, we should expect and demand top quality and high performance.

Well said. There’s been discussion before and there will be discussion in the future about this topic, and how the word Beta is a disclaimer for “don’t blame us if it doesn’t work”. SaaS vendors, especially B2B SaaS vendors, need to get this one right. The quality needs to be there for SaaS truly to take hold.