WTF is SaaS!

The most annoying part of working in IT is, in politest of terms, the creativity of the marketing people. Perfectly transparent terms like ‘virtual machine’ for example must be re-invented as ‘Platform as a Service’ with an appropriately wanker-ish abbreviation of PaaS!

I’m convinced that the main driver behind this creativity is obfuscation. By inventing a bunch of opaque terms that can’t be challenged without being labeled a pedantic bore, anyone can sound knowledgeable.

The reason for this rant is that I’ve spent the last few days in the Google cloud on a Node.js deployment tutorial. It’s quite an extensive tutorial that starts with the proverbial ‘Hello World!’ and then dives into data storage, authentication, logging and background tasks. I got stuck on the authentication part but by then I had a pretty good idea about what this is all about – and what SaaS is! Just like ‘virtual machine’ had to be re-invented, SaaS is a replacement for that simple transparent term ‘hosting’!

So for anyone who’s been around for a while:

PaaS - Virtual Machine
SaaS - Hosting

For a little more obfuscation, a ‘Virtual Machine’ in the Google Cloud falls under ‘App Engine’ and ‘Hosting’ under ‘Compute Engine’. This stuff can easily be complicated on its own so I don’t see the motivation for the constant re-invention of the terminology – hence my frustration!

Now onto something a bit more interesting. The other day I came across the rule of least power design principle, which:

suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose

And subsequent Atwood’s Law:

any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript

My first reaction was to brush this aside as typical programmer’s cynical sense of humor, but the fact that it’s supported by a W3C paper suggest otherwise. And when you think about it, the dominance of JavaScript has actually demonstrated this.

So while programming evolves towards simplicity, we can rely on the good marketing people to bewilder us.