But ‘PhonographAsAService’ Just Rolls Right Off The Tongue

Our customer Paul McNamara, CEO of Coghead, writes:

“Jeez. What’s up with the term ‘SaaS’? (‘Software as a Service’, for the uninitiated). Seems like everyone’s using it. I hate it. And it’s not just the psycho UPPERlowerlowerUPPER case – it’s the whole concept of the acronym that bothers me…the best term we can come up with is ‘SaaS’? Come on people, we can do better than that.

We don’t call radio ‘Phonograph as a Service’ (PhaaS) – although if today’s “visionaries” were alive in the ‘20s maybe we would have. It’s true that radio lets you listen to phonograph records over the air. But that’s where the similarity ends. Radio is a whole lot more.

I imagine that to the horse and buggy manufacturers, the automobile was nothing more than the ‘Horse and Buggy as a Self Propelled Vehicle’ (HaBaaSPV).

And to the manuscript producers of the middle ages, the printing press (which in the early days was operated by Scribes) was simply the ‘Scribe as an Operator of a Repeatable and Automated System for Increased Productivity and Broad-based Distribution’ (SaaOoaRaASfIPaBbD).

When technology changes the patterns of consumption in a fundamental way, then something very important is happening. A new era is dawning and new terminology is needed. Words matter.”

Paul prefers the term “webware,” by the way. Your thoughts?