Exactly, but I'm not sure about the class action lawsuit part. The contract probably forbids it and since it's B2B I bet those types of provisions stick.
The most frustrating part is that these types of situations are tough to avoid and we're starting to see them everywhere. Ex: DoorDash has a huge marketing budget / money to burn when starting up, so the early adopters see great returns because someone else is paying for a bunch of advertising for them. They tell their friends and slowly the system grows to a critical mass where you're losing out if you're not on it. Then they abuse their market position and do stuff like this.
You see it everywhere; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, app stores, adhesive terms of service, etc.. It's happening in the software development industry right now and no one's paying attention. Tons of services like SaaS Git, Saas CI, SaaS dev environments (Codespaces), templated SaaS deployment targets, etc.. The early adopters are seeing gains in efficiency, so they're out there advocating the use of all these subsidized services, but no one is considering what's going to happen in 5 years when the ownable workflow is neglected and the SaaS workflow is the only practical option.
There is a huge difference between SaaS and marketplaces. The latter is very prone to creating monopolies or oligopolies, but the former not so much.
About the developer tools you mentioned, take for an example the CI service. It is relatively easy to switch to a new one. I have used Codeship and Circle CI in the past but have switched to Google Cloud Build since it ia cheaper for my use case with Docker containers.
That was an insightful comment, pointing out a pattern.
- [A SaaS startup or established platform] has a huge marketing budget / money to burn when starting up.
- Early adopters see great returns because someone else is paying for a bunch of advertising for them.
- They tell their friends and slowly the system grows to a critical mass where you're losing out if you're not on it.
- Then they abuse their market position and do stuff like this.
To put a name to this trend, to call them "subsidized services", makes it clear to recognize how much of business/software/web ecosystem is getting consumed by the strategy.
The most frustrating part is that these types of situations are tough to avoid and we're starting to see them everywhere. Ex: DoorDash has a huge marketing budget / money to burn when starting up, so the early adopters see great returns because someone else is paying for a bunch of advertising for them. They tell their friends and slowly the system grows to a critical mass where you're losing out if you're not on it. Then they abuse their market position and do stuff like this.
You see it everywhere; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, app stores, adhesive terms of service, etc.. It's happening in the software development industry right now and no one's paying attention. Tons of services like SaaS Git, Saas CI, SaaS dev environments (Codespaces), templated SaaS deployment targets, etc.. The early adopters are seeing gains in efficiency, so they're out there advocating the use of all these subsidized services, but no one is considering what's going to happen in 5 years when the ownable workflow is neglected and the SaaS workflow is the only practical option.