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Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"
“Software as a service” is taking over the economy. The bubble can’t pop soon enough.
While most companies require physical offices, factories, or raw materials to produce their product, a digital interface runs on a few human programmers and a monthly bill from Google or AWS, whose power-hungry, water-guzzling “cloud” data centers now have “a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry,” according to anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate. Spreadsheets are the long tail of datasets that don’t have their own SaaS tool yet.” Why let a business-critical workflow exist in some generic document, easily shared across systems and possibly fulfilling every task requirement, when you could corral those actions into a gated domain, gussy up the UI to imply value or progress, and charge a monthly subscription for it? In the Kafkaesque realm of health care, software giant Epic’s 1990s-era UI is still widely used for electronic medical records, a nuisance that arguably puts millions of lives at risk, even as it accrues billions in annual revenue and actively resists system interoperability.
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