A Few Historical Parallels

Disclaimer: To save time, the TL;DR version of this article is found in the section 'Potential New Trend.'

As humanity has evolved, at certain times, various material possessions were considered luxury items — precious metals, personal cold and firearms, means of transportation, real estate, and so on.

The object in focus is the Bugatti Type 57 — a Gran Turismo car by Bugatti Automobiles, an exclusive high-end vehicle for the wealthy. It was produced from 1934 to 1940 and has two modifications: Type 57S and Atalante. The car's body design was created by Jean Bugatti.

When considering the cycle of production revolutions, one can conditionally highlight some of the most prominent types of luxury that have entered mass trends only to cease being seen as luxury over time due to their widespread adoption:

• cold weapons and uniforms (starting from the invention of metal processing methods)
  In ancient times and during the feudal era, owning cold weapons and uniforms was considered a great luxury, an expensive possession that opened the way to promising military service (participating in wars, mercenary armies, land acquisitions), power, and more. Thus, personal weapons were a luxury.
• personal car (industrial revolution — scientific-information revolution)
  With the invention of the automobile, it continues to be regarded as a luxury. It is something that requires expenses, investments, and maintenance, but it provides a person with great freedom of movement and personal space on the road (for commuting, for example).

• PC (scientific-information revolution).
  In the 1950s and 1960s, computers were only available to large companies due to their size and cost. In the competitive struggle to increase sales, companies producing computers aimed to reduce costs and miniaturize their products. They utilized all the modern advancements in science: magnetic core memory, transistors, and eventually microchips. By 1965, the minicomputer PDP-8 occupied a volume comparable to that of a household refrigerator, costing around 20,000 dollars, and there was also a trend towards further miniaturization.

  Sales volumes of personal computers were low at the end of the 1970s, but for an entirely new product, the commercial success was staggering. This was due to the emergence of software that addressed users' needs for automating information processing. In the early 1980s, the most popular was the programming language made for 'dummies' BASIC, text editor WordStar (the purpose of its 'hot' keys is still used today) and the spreadsheet VisiCalc, which has now grown into a giant called Excel.

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

A potential new trend

Next, I will outline my vision. This is more of an attempt to predict the near future rather than serious analytics or a well-founded forecast. It's an attempt to be a futurist based on my own indirect observations and intuition in the IT field.

So, in the age of information development, with computers pervading our lives, I see a budding luxury personal SaaS. That is, a service created to work strictly under the needs of a specific person (or a narrow group of people, such as a family or a group of friends). It is not hosted by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or other giants of the IT industry. It was either manually brought into production by the user themselves or ordered or purchased for a considerable amount from some contractor, such as a freelancer.

Examples, prerequisites, and indirect signs:

• there are people who are dissatisfied SaaS. Not businesses, but rather individual people or groups of people. There will be no statistics here, just complaints from individuals in the same news and technical articles by major market players (Yandex, Google, Microsoft). The leading IT podcasts also share their pain and demonstrate their critical attitude towards SaaS-s.
• examples of large companies removing their services
  • Google Plus is shutting down. And what?
  • Google is closing the photo service Picasa
  • Shit happens. Yandex has removed part of its virtual machines from its cloud
    There is even a website Killed by Google. A kind of virtual graveyard of Google projects that have been shut down.
• examples of IT issues, data leaks, data loss, screw-ups
  • The code storage service GitLab accidentally deleted nearly 300 GB of data due to a sysadmin error
  • Facebook stored hundreds of millions of passwords in plain text on its servers. Thousands of employees had access to them. * Not SaaS, but still...
• paranoia or a justified reluctance to share one's personal data
• the value of personal data and online comfort is becoming increasingly critical for individuals; this data is very valuable and only becoming more valuable for any business that greedily and aggressively hunts for this personal information (targeted advertising, imposed services and questionable tariffs, as well as hackers — are likely the main threats in this regard)
• the emergence in Open Source solutions for an increasing number of application tasks: from personal notes to financial accounting systems and personal cloud storage.

• merely my own scenarios that push me to at least search for and study the possibilities of existing Open Source solutions.

  For example, recently I seriously considered self-hosting a note-taking service accessible to me online through my mobile phone or desktop. The choice of the best solution is still in process; I'm interested in an easily deployable solution with minimal functionality for note storage and protection (for example, Basic Auth). Additionally, I would like the solution to be able to run as Docker a container, which maximally ensures speed and convenience in deployment for me. I would appreciate recommendations in the comments. Since so far, my hand is reaching for the keyboard to IDE write such a simple service myself.

Conclusions and implications

Based on the assumption of a growing trend, a series of conclusions can be drawn:

• this is a potentially promising niche. It seems to me that this presents an opportunity to either build or restructure a business providing IT or media services and sell solutions tailored to individual orders. It is important to target clients specifically viewing personal SaaS as a luxury, willing to pay above market rates in exchange for some good guarantees of the services provided.
• Developing such solutions is not easy and can be expensive, effectively representing a separate project specification for each order. In reality, it cannot be considered a new niche or a business model. In essence, this is probably what many companies have grown from, along with their products, or outsourcing companies that specialize in developing such solutions based on individual requirements.
• You could take a different approach; for instance, if you are a developer, you could enter the Open Source realm specifically in the area of creating such solutions—select a problem, find existing projects, and contribute there. Alternatively, you could start your own project from scratch on a public repository hosting service aimed at addressing a specific problem and build a community of users and contributors around it.
• The load profile of such an application and its requirements differ from those of public SaaS services, which are designed for simultaneous mass usage. For instance, if there is only one user, you don't need a system capable of supporting thousands of connections or processing millions of requests per second. Speed and reliability remain essential— the service should be able to reserve its subsystems, respond quickly, and manage data backups effectively. All of this means that you can focus on other aspects during design and development, sacrificing scalability and performance, for example, to concentrate on the speed of introducing new features or ensuring maximum possible consistency or data protection.

Bonus

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

• awesome-selfhosted — GitHub repository list for Self-Hosted solutions for various needs. Blogging, chats, distributed file storage, and so on.
• Who does that server really serve? — critique SaaS by Richard Stallman.

Source: habr.com