Dependencies

I hate to say it but with every new, seemingly useful, service I come across I feel a pang of anxiety over whether it’ll still be around in a year.

Sometimes I think I’m being overly cautious. A software as a service model doesn't doom a business to failure. But with each acquisition, security breach and shutdown I become less and less convinced it's a sustainable idea.

I wish the solution were as simple as purchasing and hosting my own instances of existing software but that's rarely an option. Only a few companies offer this (and most never will). Blogging also seems to be the only web task established enough to have generated companies that use this model.

Why is this the case? Are there flaws inherent to distributed software? Is SaaS really a superior model? What can we do to become less reliant on potentially flimsy services?

If you’ve had thoughts along these lines be sure to reply via twitter or email.

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