Few historical parallels

Disclaimer : To save time TL; DR version of this article is the section "Potential new trend."

With the development of mankind, in a certain epoch, people considered luxury goods as various types of material values ​​- precious metals, personal cold and firearms, vehicles, real estate, and so on.

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

If you look at the production revolutions cycle, you can conditionally distinguish such the brightest types of luxury, included in the mass trends and further, over time, no longer seem to us a luxury, just in view of their extensive distribution among the masses:

• cold arms and uniforms (since the invention of the methods of processing metals)
  In ancient times and in the feudal era, own cold arms and uniforms were considered a great luxury, expensive property, opening the way to promising military service (participation in wars, mercenary armies, land grabbing), power and so on. Thus, personal weapons were a luxury.
• private car (industrial revolution - scientific information revolution)
  With the invention of the car and, in principle, and to our days, the car is still considered a luxury. This is a thing that requires expenses, investments, 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 1960s, computers were only available to large companies because of their size and price. In the competitive struggle for an increase in sales, firms producing computers sought to reduce the cost and miniaturize their products. All modern achievements of science were used for this: memory on magnetic cores, transistors, and finally microcircuits. By 1965, the PDP-8 mini-computer occupied a volume comparable to a domestic refrigerator, the cost was about 20 thousand dollars, in addition, there was a tendency to further miniaturization.

  
  

  The sales of personal computers in the late 1970s were low, but for a completely new product, commercial success was overwhelming. 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 were the programming language for dummies BASIC , the word editor WordStar (which hot keys have been used for so far) and the tabular processor VisiCalc , which has now 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 had a PC in the apartment.

  
  

Potential new trend

Next, I set out my vision. It is rather an attempt to predict the near future than a serious analyst or a rigorous sound forecast. Attempt to be a futurologist on the basis of my own indirect signs observed by me and intuition in the field of IT.

So, in the age of information development, the widespread participation of computers in our lives, I see personalized SaaS as a brewing luxury. That is, the service performed and working strictly for the needs of a particular person (or a narrow group of people, for example, a family, a group of friends). He is not hosted by Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other giants of the IT industry. He either was self-deduced "in production" by the user, or ordered or bought for considerable sums from a certain contractor, such as a freelancer.

Examples, background and indirect signs:

• There are people dissatisfied with SaaS . Not a business, but just individuals or groups of people. There will be no statistics here, just individual complaints 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 SaaS .
• examples with large companies removing their services
  
  • Google Plus stops working. So what?
  • Google closes Picasa photo service
  • Shit happens. Yandex has deleted part of the virtual machines in its cloud
    The network even operates the site Killed by Google . A virtual cemetery of Google projects that were closed.
• examples of information security, data leakage, data loss, packs
  
  • The GitLab code storage service accidentally deleted almost 300 GB of data due to a sysadmin error.
  • Facebook stored hundreds of millions of passwords on its servers in the clear. They were accessed by thousands of employees * Not Saas, but still ..
• paranoia or a reasonable reluctance to share their personal data
• the value of personal data and personal comfort online are becoming more critical for individuals; this data is very valuable and only becomes more expensive for any business, which eagerly and aggressively hunts for this personal data (targeted advertising, imposed services and tariffs of dubious nature, as well as hackers are probably the main threats in this regard)
• the emergence in Open Source solutions for all large applied tasks: from personal notes to the financial accounting system to a personal file cloud.

• Trite own scripts that push me to at least search and explore the capabilities of existing Open Source solutions.

  
  

  For example, I recently thought hard about independently hosting a note-taking service that is available to me online via a mobile phone or desktop. Choosing the best solution while still in the process, is 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 Docker container, which simply maximally ensures the speed and convenience of deployment for me personally. I would be happy to recommend in the comments. Since so far the hand is reaching for the keyboard and the IDE to write such a simple service yourself.

  
  

Conclusions and Implications

On this assumption of a growing trend, you can build a number of conclusions:

• This is a potential promising niche. It seems to me that this is an opportunity to build or restructure a business to provide IT or media services and sell solutions for individual orders. Here it is important to go exactly to customers who consider personal SaaS as a luxury, willing to pay for such a higher market, in return for 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 something that many companies have grown with their products, or outsourcing companies, which are 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 area of ​​developing such solutions - choose some problem, find existing projects, become a contributor there. Or, start keeping your own project from scratch on a public hosting of repositories for a specific problem and build up a community of users and contributors around it.
• The load profile of such an application and the requirements are different from all those public SaaS services that are designed for simultaneous mass use. For example, if there is only one user, you do not need a system capable of supporting thousands of connections or processing millions of requests per second. The speed and fault tolerance of course also remains necessary - the service must be able to back up its subsystems, respond quickly, be able to make and restore backups of data. All this means that you can focus on other things in the design and development, sacrifice scalability, performance, for example, focusing on the speed of introducing new features or, for example, to ensure the highest possible consistency or data protection.

Bonus

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

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