Yesterday was another ridiculous day in tech history. If you blinked, here's the quick rundown: XAI launched Grok3 (supposedly on par with o1-pro), Perplexity put out an open-sourced "de-politicized" version of R1 called R1 1776 (yes, that's real), Apple debuted its first custom modem chip, Sakana AI unveiled an AI CUDA engineer, and Microsoft dropped a f#@$ing quantum computing chip. Any one of these launches would've caused a frenzy a year ago, but now they zip by so fast most of us barely notice. We're sliding into the future like it's greased.
Last night, I was chatting with a friend about the releases that had come out earlier in the day when I made a pretty schitzo-sounding prediction that SaaS would die within the next 7 years. My friend's not very technical, but he lives in SF, stays up to date on releases, and is forced to listen to me regurgitate tweets I read on twitter dot com whenever we hang out -- so he's probably more open to big ideas than most. But the SaaS prediction sounded insane to him. Which is completely understandable, because I felt insane saying it.
I've recently had to make an effort to not sound like a rambling crank with these future-of-tech rants, but this is becoming harder to do as the gap between sci-fi and the real world is rapidly shrinking. Sometimes, you just gotta lean in and thoroughly explain your rationale.
Imagine a future where a user can ask a model for some outcome / task / service and the model figures out any intermediary step, creates any necessary software, spins up the appropriate infrastructure, and completes all necessary tasks to produce the required outcome. This would be a lower effort approach than a user clicking 'manually' wrestling with a GUI for the same results. It's hard to image because it doesn't exist (and because most people have the imagination capacity of a cat[^1]). Maybe it won't look exactly like that, but the key point I'm trying to make is this: in the future using modern SaaS will not be the easiest option. And as soon as an easier option exists, people switch.
For better or worse, technology is and always will be a tool to maximize leverage while minimizing cost. Lower the input, raise the output - that's the entire job description of innovation. And although it might be getting harder and harder to visualize what a lower effort input looks like, there is no reason to believe that this trend will ever stop.
I do not like this part of human nature
Our instinct to gravitate toward the "least effort path" does a lot of damage. Look at how online dating, short-form videos, social media, and countless "B2C experiences" exploit this tendency. Kids, in particular, get thrown under the bus as corporations chase profits no matter the cost to society. It's predatory, and we've seen real data on how harmful it can be—especially for the young. I think stricter laws around targeting children with real criminal punishment if corporations fail to comply is not unreasonable. But that's a whole other rant -- let's not go too far down that rabbit hole right now.
One thing I've learned is that logic alone doesn't always seal the deal when predicting the future. Even after I laid out the rationale, my friend Dan still wasn't buying it—and honestly, neither was I, at least not in my gut. Even if we were to assume the logic I gave is correct, something still felt 'wrong' about this scenario. We tried to make counterarguments but we were unable to produce logic that we felt reflected the truth. Does every disruptive idea feel absurd right up until it happens? Is that a prerequisite for something that is truly disruptive? The very notion that the SaaS sector, which seems to employ 90% of San Francisco could vanish seems impossible. But so did a quantum chip from Microsoft last year.
I too, am not in love with this idea of SaaS disappearing (I'm working on a SaaS startup at the moment) and I'm not exactly stoked about the idea of more power being consolidated in fewer hands if SaaS were to disappear. However, my adventures from buying naked call options a few years ago have taught me to never trust my own emotions -- so I'm inclined to believe the cold, hard, logic. The future rarely cares about our comfort zones. And if history is any guide, the most entertaining outcome tends to be the most likely
[^1]: This was rude, but seriously. Most people only regurgitate what they have consumed. Creativity is a skill that atrophies if not practiced and the modern world is set up in a way that requires most people to consume instead of create!