SaaS Was an Interface to a Database

In 1999 Marc Benioff founded Salesforce in San Francisco and chose as its logo the word “software” crossed out. The point was that programs no longer had to be bought on disks, installed on your own servers and updated for years: everything lives in the browser, you pay every month, and the rest is the vendor’s worry. Benioff staged stunts: he hired actors to pose as protesters outside a competitor’s conference, carrying placards against software. Twenty-five years later the model he was selling is called SaaS, software as a service, and a sizeable part of the world economy rests on it.

If you look at a typical program of this kind through an engineer’s eyes, setting the marketing aside, it is built with remarkable uniformity. At the bottom lies a database. Above it, the business rules: a discount may not exceed twenty percent, an invoice is not sent without a manager’s signature, a customer without a phone number cannot move to the next stage. Above the rules, a screen with forms, tables, filters and the buttons “create,” “open,” “change” and “delete.” Programmers even have a common name for these four actions, CRUD, from the first letters of the English words, and a huge part of corporate software, once you strip off the pretty wrapping, comes down to them.

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This construction has a part that is not drawn on the diagrams. It is still a person who decides that it is time to call a customer, that it is time to issue an invoice, that it is time to move a deal from “negotiation” to “contract.” A sales manager spends the whole day going from tab to tab: he opens the customer’s card, rereads the email correspondence, looks at the calendar, returns to the card, changes the stage, writes a note, sets himself a task for Thursday. The program stores the state of affairs, and it is the person who connects it, moves it and turns it into actions. He is the glue code of the third chapter, only alive, expensive and going home at six.