To be fair SaaS destroyed the previous financial model of the software industry, which was much better for the end user imo. Back then, software companies tried to make good, comprehensive products that respected user privacy, were meant to run locally, provide a complete solution to the problem, and were supposed to be a permanent solution. Better software meant more sales and more money. Unfortunately excessive piracy broke this model.

Sure, today's software capabilities are much more advanced, but you no longer get a physical disk that you can load on you computer and be confident it'll just keep working for years on end without any external dependencies etc.

Looking at the best software, the sass world has created, Google - it's orders of magnitude more valuable than any PC based software.

So maybe it isn't fair to say the user for a bad deal.

Google is a jumbled mess of multiple pieces of software, and you get access to none of them, only a search service, and it is loosely defined. Also Google isn't particularly good at anything nowdays, except maybe NLP. Their ability to deliver good results is only a result of massive spying. Many researchers would be able to provide software 10x as useful as that of Google given access to the same data.

Imagine a pre-SaaS Google: You get a few of LTO tapes delivered to your doorstep. They include an index of every website in existence, it's owner/creator, a short description of what it is, and a number of semantic flags.

Moreover, you'd probably get a list of all identified businesses there are in every country, region and industry with their contact information and website addresses.

Imagine what you could do with that...

>> Many researchers would be able to provide software 10x as useful as that of Google given access to the same data.

That's interesting. Can you share more about this ?

As for your pre-sass search engine idea:it's great. Very useful indeed.

But how do I get from that , to finding the bunch of separate webpages that describe how to solve my personal, niche problem( in a really good way ? Most problems are like that. Context is always different.

And yes Google is far from ideal. And SEO sucks.

But still, that problem solving capability is now available to many.

Google search is an exception in that it really needs to be a SaaS because there is no way you can run it locally. Your typical SaaS doesn't need to be one.

I did not mean in general, but sometimes there is stuff that never got a better replacement.

well, maybe if there were 'some closed-source proprietary software that you once loved that is not being developed/enhanced any more' that was completely unique someone would say it? hmm