Software as a Serf: The Prologue
Introductory Remarks
Initially, today’s post was to be part of my series called The Good Products, where I review products that have served me well. Duolingo, the highly memetic language-learning app, was on my mind. Duolingo has served me well. No other application on my phone has driven positive outcomes in my life like Duolingo. I have a 600 day streak there, meaning I have completed at least one lesson on the service for the last 600 days. With Duolingo, I have acquired sufficient skills in Portuguese to read Clarice Lispector, in French to read Jean-Paul Sartre. Later, perhaps, I will write another post detailing its benefits, offering advice on language acquisition through Duolingo.
But in interrogating my relationship with the app I picked on a knottier thread worth unraveling. I do not own Duolingo. It is not like my rice cooker. Duolingo uses a software-as-a-service (SaaS, as it’s commonly abbreviated) model, a now commonplace arrangement where users gain access to apps through subscriptions and advertisements, but where the code itself is not owned by the user. As this thread untangled, I discovered that I had more to say about software-as-a-service than I thought. Analysis often runs away from me.
This is the first in a three part series analyzing the discontents of SaaS through three case studies: Duolingo, Adobe Flash, and Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (abbreviated WoW). I write this series because I believe that an idea that I have posited before on this blog concerning the nature of ownership handily delineates how software-as-a-service differs from the software-as-a-product model that traditionally defined software, and exposes the issues that I have with the popularization of SaaS over SaaP.
In this article, I will outline the theoretical aspects of my argument, with aforementioned case studies to follow.
In my discussion of NFTs, I posited that “ownership” is not a uniformly defined term, but rather a heterogeneous one that covers a variety of different relationships with the things we are said to own. The one thing that unites “ownership” is that owners hold certain rights with respect to the thing that they own, but these rights can differ greatly based on the object we own, and how we are said to own it. I want to examine the difference between owning a piece of software, and owning a one-year subscription to a SaaS tool, by outlining two rights that owners hold when they purchase a SaaP and which they forego when they own a SaaS subscription.
The difference between SaaP and SaaS is not merely that under a SaaS arrangement we regularly pay for subscriptions. Certainly, this arrangement has an impact, the same impact that exists when we choose to rent or choose to own a home, namely that if we stop paying for the service the service is no longer ours. But there are two other rights precluded by the SaaS model which I shall collectively call the right to maintenance, with the right to forgo an upgrade and the right to maintain a product after discontinuation constituting this greater right. I like the right to maintenance because it is catchier than the names I’ve given these two individual rights, both of which deal with the ability to maintain and preserve a piece of software in its current state, and so I shall call them the right to maintenance when I can.
Before I examine this right in detail, I do wish to note that, while this series will highlight the discontents of SaaS and therefore be a bit of a Debbie Downer, I believe that SaaS has a place, and in an addendum to this article I will highlight the benefits of SaaS. In my adult life, I have had the privilege of working for excellent healthcare SaaS companies. In working for SaaS companies focused on enterprise healthcare software, that is, software sold to businesses rather than to consumers, I have concluded that SaaS is most useful in situations where there is either an ever changing roster of client needs, thus requiring constant revision of the product and expansion of features, or when the software works with large corpuses of data thus requiring the power of cloud computing, a hallmark of SaaS tools. Healthcare is a great example of this: because laws and regulations around healthcare, as well as the state of the medical arts, are constantly evolving, and because healthcare software must often ingest and process large quantities of patient data, SaaS provides great value for enterprise companies.
However, this is a blog about consumption, and here we focus on consumers: I believe that, in general, SaaS is a poor fit for consumer needs. The reason is two-fold. Individual consumers rarely produce more data than can be reasonably stored on their personal computers, and as such don’t need the advantages of cloud computing, and consumer needs rarely escalate in a routine manner requiring regular updates to a product’s features. These being the two benefits of SaaS that I have witnessed, their absence, along with foregoing the right to maintenance, makes them a poor fit for consumer products.
I like to focus my arguments on the value that I can reasonably add for my readers, and as such, I will narrowly address the right to maintenance in the following section and then use case studies to outline the drawbacks of software without a right to maintenance. This then is not a comprehensive address as to the issues surrounding SaaS, but a narrow argument examining a particular drawback of the modality.
Ownership as a Set of Rights
To begin, I would like to further develop my idea of ownership as a set of rights. I made the argument previously that when we say that we “own” something, we mean different things depending on what we claim to own. Owning a SaaP, like Microsoft Word, seems to me different from owning a home, which seems different from owning a rice cooker, which differs from owning a stock. Ownership, then, does not denote a uniform positionality between the person who owns and the things which is owned. Rather, ownership is a contract between the owner and society with regards to a specific owned object, and this contract affords the owner certain rights with respect to this object, rights often dependent on the genre of object.
The reason I proposed it in the context of NFTs is that the question of what it means to own an NFT has often confused people. When someone says that they “own Jack Dorsey’s first tweet,” it is unclear what they actually mean. By analyzing the rights that an NFT owner has with respect to their NFT, that is, what they are legally allowed to do with it and how they are able to do these things, we get a richer understanding of both what owning an NFT looks like and the reason that someone would elect to purchase one. Delineating these rights helped me determine that NFTs are a bubble (a prediction which came true, at least for now).
I posit that enumerating rights has a similar use when distinguishing between SaaP and SaaS.
To further concretize why this framework is beneficial, I will look at two different ways of owning a piece of software, namely, owning a video game on disk versus owning a video game through something like Steam. This short example will help readers understand what I get at when I discuss something as intangible as rights.
Owning a video game on Steam and owning it on disk affords many similar rights to the owner: namely, you get to play the game. But, when one owns a game on disk, one has the right to do things with that game that they do not hold when they purchase the game on Steam. For example, you can loan a game on disk to a friend. You also keep the right to resell that game. When you purchase a game from Steam, it lives on your laptop, and you can neither resell it nor loan it.
However, with Steam, one gets certain rights not available with disk. You can download the Steam client onto any personal laptop, and you have the right to download your game onto any of these machines. This right to download gives the game extra portability, which has the outcome of allowing you to play your games more places and more flexibly. Additionally, with Steam, you have the right to use its software to screenshare your games on Smart TVs and tablets, which provides further flexibility.
This brings me to a second aspect of this theory: the rights that we find in ownership are only important to owners because they directly produce outcomes. In the example of the video game on disk, one has the right to resell the game, and the outcome of that decision would be extra money. With Steam, one has flexibility, and the outcome is easier access to one’s games. The rights produce the outcomes, and therefore when one’s ownership retains or precludes certain rights, that has an impact.
By analyzing rights, we analyze outcomes, which is the ultimate purpose of this article: using case studies, we will analyze the outcomes of losing the right to maintenance when we move to SaaS.
The Right to Maintenance
We can extend our video game on disk and our video game on Steam example to introduce the two heads of the right to maintenance. The right to maintenance concerns itself with changes to the service which the user of the software cannot reject.
The Right to Refuse an Update
Historically, video games on disk did not have updates, though this has changed: Cyberpunk 2077 can be purchased on disk, but CD Projekt Red, the developer, can still update the software. Therefore, let’s start out by specifying further: our video game on disk will be an old Gamecube disk, specifically, when addressing the right to refuse an update.
As mentioned before, one of the benefits of SaaS is that it allows for frequent updates. You know this and accept this with some frustration: Instagram, Facebook, all of these are subscription services powered by advertisements with routine updates. And indeed, updates can be of great benefit.
But, there will always be missteps when updating products. Developers and product managers will elect to deprecate features that a user may rely on, or to make changes to current features based on some inaccurate sense of its usage. One cannot please everyone, and so every change will negatively impact someone.
When you own a game on disk, traditionally, you normally reserved the right to maintain the game as it currently stood. For an old Gamecube game, there was no means for the console to even connect to the Internet, and as such the development studio had no recourse to update the product at a later date. Animal Crossing on Gamecube is the same as it ever was twenty years after its release, and shall be for twenty years hence.
With Steam, you can forgo updates to an extent, maintaining the product as it currently exists on your local machine if you so wish. But, if you elect to download the game onto a new machine, you are only allowed to download the most recent version. In this way, you are denied the ability to forgo an update, and for other SaaS products, like Facebook in a web browser, this denial is stricter.
The Right to Maintain Discontinued Software
Companies will discontinue unpopular, and popular, products. Given that many companies are destined to die, or to be merged with another company, discontinuation may be the only inevitability of software.
When companies sunset support for a SaaP, generally, the product remains available to users who had bought the tool. I used Microsoft Word 2007, for example, through 2015. Yet, when a company provides their software as a service, when no code is stored locally and when using the tool necessarily requires having your machine talk to a server at the company’s headquarters, the tool will simply stop working when the company decides to take those servers offline, or if they’re forced to do so in a bankruptcy.
We can return to our video game hypothetical. If, at some point, Valve, the owner of Steam, were to go bankrupt and sunset the service, what exactly would happen to all of the video games that we own on the service? Looking at our contract, we realize that we have only contracted the ability to download games from Steam, which means that if the server from which we download our games were to be decomissioned, this right would be utterly worthless.
Here is where ownership as a set of rights shines in distinguishing SaaS and SaaP. With a video game for Gamecube, I and others have the right to play that game as long as physical Gamecubes exist. I have the right to play unmediated. The only thing that could excise my right to play the game would be if I didn’t own a Gamecube, if I scratched the disk, or if I resold the disk. With Steam, I have the right to download, and then now owning a local copy, I have the right to play the game on my machine. Upon its discontinuation, I may retain the right to play those games currently loaded onto my machine, but the right to portability mentioned above would vanish, and if my current machine were to be destroyed or replaced, as often occurs, my game would disappear as well. When our rights are tied to the presence of servers somewhere in the cloud, rather than to the presence of code on our machines, our usage of the tool becomes more fragile.
Or, to make it catchy: when we rent, as a subscription service necessitates, we always have the chance of being evicted. Steam could evict anyone, everyone, if it wished.
Going Forward
Tragically, you have stuck with me this long, and so having outlined the theory which will underlie my analysis, we can now discuss at a high level what each of my case studies will present. What follows are précis outlining what to expect in each subsequent case study.
World of Warcraft
With World of Warcraft, I will explore the right to refuse an upgrade. WoW launched in 2004, and the game has seen a number of changes since its original launch. In WoW, I hope to impress how forced upgrades endanger our ability to preserve cultural artifacts we cherish. World of Warcraft is both a beloved game, and a major cultural phenomenon whose design elements in 2004 influenced a number of subsequent games, and yet a number of these influential design elements have been excised in subsequent updates, impoverishing the study of video games as they were in the early aughts, and impoverishing the study of how video games work.
Flash
Adobe Flash was a popular content-creation tool used in the early aughts to produce animations and simple browser-based games. Flash was discontinued in early 2021, and its discontinuation not only ended the ability for creators to produce new content with Flash, but also ended the ability for content consumers to interact with any piece of art made with Flash. Every Flash game in existence is now unplayable. Here, we can look at the right to maintain a piece of software after its discontinuation, and how our failure to retain this right with Flash has erased large sections of early-aughts Internet culture.
Duolingo
The original kernel for this idea, in my Duolingo case study I will focus once again on the right to refuse an upgrade. Here, I will focus on how small changes can have a major impact on the efficacy of a tool. Since Duolingo is much simpler an application compared to WoW, we will be able to more effectively chase how design decisions lead to outcomes, and how changes to a tool can disadvantage users.