Some historical parallels

Disclaimer : To save TL; DR time, a variant of this article is the Potential New Trend section.

With the development of mankind, in a certain era, people were considered a luxury item various material values ​​- precious metals, private cold and firearms, vehicles, real estate and so on.

The KDPV facility, the Bugatti Type 57, is a Bugatti Automobiles Gran Turismo car, a single high-end car for the rich. It was produced in the years 1934-1940. It has two modifications: Type 57S and Atalante. The car body design was developed by Jean Bugatti.

If we look in the context of the cycle of production revolutions, then we can conditionally distinguish the most striking types of luxury that have become part of mass trends and already further, over time, ceasing to seem like a luxury to us, just in view of their wide distribution among the masses:

• edged weapons and uniforms (starting with the invention of metal processing methods)
  In ancient centuries and in the feudal era, own edged weapons and uniforms were considered a great luxury, expensive property, paving the way for promising military service (participation in wars, mercenary armies, land capture), authorities and so on. Thus, personal weapons were a luxury.
• personal car (industrial revolution - scientific and informational revolution)
  With the invention of the car, and in principle to this day, the car is still considered a luxury. This is a thing that requires costs, investment, care, but gives a person greater freedom of movement, personal space on the road (for work, for example).

• PC (scientific information revolution).
  In the 1950s and 60s, computers were available only to large companies because of their size and price. In the competition for increased sales, computer companies sought to reduce the cost and miniaturize their products. For this, all modern scientific achievements were used: memory on magnetic cores, transistors, and finally microcircuits. By 1965, the mini-computer PDP-8occupied a volume comparable to a household refrigerator, the cost was approximately $ 20 thousand, in addition, there was a tendency to further miniaturization.

  
  

  Personal computer sales were low in the late 1970s, but for a completely new product, commercial success was staggering. The reason for this was the emergence of software that covered the needs of users in the automation of information processing. In the early 1980s, the most popular programming language was for dummies BASIC, a text editor WordStar(whose hotkey assignments are still in use) and a spreadsheet processor VisiCalc, which by now has grown into a giant called Excel.

  
  

  In my childhood, in the 90s, PCs were also considered something cool and rarely available, not every working family in the apartment had a PC.

  
  

Potential new trend

Next, I will outline my vision. This is more of an attempt to predict the near future than a serious analytics or a strict reasonable forecast. Trying to be a futurologist based on my own indirect signs and intuition in IT that I have observed.

So, in the age of information development, the ubiquitous participation of computers in our lives, I see personal SaaS as a brewing luxury . That is, a service performed and working purely for the needs of a particular person (or a narrow group of people, for example, family, group of friends). It is not hosted by Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other giants of the IT industry. It was either self-made “brought into production” by the user himself, or ordered or bought for considerable amounts from a certain contractor, for example, a freelancer.

Examples, premises and indirect features:

• there are people dissatisfied SaaS. Not a business, but just individuals or groups of people. There will be no statistics, just complaints of individuals in the same news and technical articles of major market players (Yandex, Google, Microsoft). Leading IT podcasts also share their pain and demonstrate their critical attitude towards SaaSs.
• examples of large companies removing their services
  
  • Google Plus stops working. So what?
  • Google closes Picasa photo service
  • Shit happens. Yandex has deleted some of the virtual machines in its cloud.
    The network even operates the site Killed by Google . A kind of virtual cemetery for Google projects that were closed.
• examples with information security, data leakage, data loss, fakapy
  
  • GitLab code storage service accidentally deleted almost 300 GB of data due to a system administrator error
  • Facebook stored hundreds of millions of passwords in its clear text on its servers. Thousands of employees had access to them * Not Saas, but still ..
• paranoia or reasonable unwillingness to share your Personal Data
• the value of personal data and personal comfort online are becoming more critical for individuals; this data is very valuable and only rises in price for any business that eagerly and aggressively hunts for this personal data (targeted advertising, imposed services and tariffs of a dubious nature, as well as hackers are probably the main threats in this regard)
• appearance in Open Sourcesolutions for ever-larger applied problems: from personal notes to the financial accounting system and personal file cloud.

• trite own scenarios that push me at least to search and explore the possibilities of existing Open Sourcesolutions.

  
  

  For example, recently I was thinking hard about hosting my own note service, available to me online through a mobile phone or desktop. Choosing the best solution is still in the process, we are interested in an easily deployable solution with minimal functionality for storing notes and protection (for example, Basic Auth). Also, I would like the solution to be launched as a Dockercontainer, which simply maximizes the speed and ease of deployment for me personally. Would be glad to recommendations in the comments. Since so far the hand reaches for the keyboard and IDEwrite such a simple service yourself.

  
  

Conclusions and Consequences

Based on this assumption of a growing trend, a number of conclusions can be drawn:

• This is a potential promising niche. It seems to me that this is an opportunity to build or rebuild the business of providing IT or media services and sell solutions for an individual order. It is important here to reach out to customers who consider personal SaaS as a luxury, ready to pay for something higher than the market, in exchange receiving some good guarantees of the services provided.
• the development of such solutions is not easy, expensive, in fact it is a separate TK for each order. In fact, this cannot be considered a new niche or business model. In fact, this is probably what many companies with their products have grown up with, or outsourcing companies, just leading such development according to individual requirements.
• you can go on the other hand, and for example, if you are a developer, then enter Open Source just in the field of developing such solutions - choose some problem, find existing projects, become a contributor there. Or, start your own project on a public hosting of repositories from scratch for a specific problem and build a community of users and contributors around it.
• the load profile of such an application and the requirements differ from all those public SaaS services that are designed for simultaneous mass use. For example, if the user is just one, you don’t need a system that can support thousands of connections or process millions of requests per second. Speed ​​and fault tolerance of course also remains necessary - the service must be able to backup its subsystems, respond quickly, be able to make and restore data backups. All this means that you can focus on other things during design and development, sacrifice scalability, performance, for example by focusing on the speed of introducing new features or for example providing the highest possible consistency or data protection.

Bonus

Below I will provide links to useful projects, interesting articles:

• awesome-selfhosted - GitHub list repository with Self-Hostedsolutions for different needs. Blogging, chats, distributed file storage and so on.
• Who does that server really serve? - criticism of SaaSthe authorship of Richard Stallman.