Tools vs Products

I have a garage full of neat tools.  Drill press, miter saw, band saw, table saw, power sander, Dremel, several Milwaukee power drills and portable hand saws, gauges, clamps, vise grips...yeah, the works. But I've learned something over the years; other than other people with a shared interest in nifty tools, nobody cares about the tools I have.  What they care about is the speed, quality and cost involved in making things with those tools.  I can own the niftiest hammer on the face of the planet, but few people will care; they care about the house I build, regardless of the coolness of the hammer.

This concept is not limited to traditional shop and construction tools.  Pull out your smartphone.  Take a look at the apps.  Nobody cares about what tools were used to build the app if it misses the mark on quality, speed, ease of use, or cost.

The same holds true for SaaS applications.  Customers don't care about the underlying platform...nor should they, when the idea is to make all that complexity transparent to them.  Customers care about care about speed, ease of implementation and use, quality (including reliability, depth of features and security), how well the application will perform their business process, and the information the application will provide about those executed transactions.

So, to put it bluntly, SaaS is not about the platform nor the development tools.  It's about ease of use, quality, and cost.  Let's stop talking about the technology and start talking about the things that matter.