Why We’re Better

I was just catching up on Lars Pind’s software blog and I came across this snippet from John Gruber of Daring Fireball:

The fact that guess work is not necessary in Software As A Service (SAAS) feedback driven software development is a boon for users and developers alike.  Guess work is the reason accounting software companies like Intuit QuickBooks have got it wrong for so long.  They built in all the features you could possibly imagine because they had the resources.  They did not worry about the fact that it took 12 steps to create an invoice and five hours to set up your software.

In the SAAS paradigm (and FreshBooks is a perfect example of this) it’s now common sense (i.e. “what do we build next?”) that is the x factor for many software services.  “How can we add feature A, and still provide our users with the fastest way to generate invoices?  Do we even need to add feature A, or is there a work around?”

I went on to comment on Lars’ blog as follows:

Developing software pre a web enabled instant feedback loop was infinitely harder because of the distance between developers and users. SAAS closes that gap and benefits both parties.”