I’m working on a post on that topic, but the key idea is:
Historically, some of the leading SaaS companies become so by leveraging a shift in business model (from onprem to SaaS), but at the moment, I think some of the incumbents are becoming more resilient to competition than ever before — at least, founder-lead companies like salesforce, oracle, etc even MS.
In those categories, it’s pretty hard to disrupt them by looking at the obvious shifts (ie. a mobile-first CRM, a machine-learning first CRM, etc.) because they might come late (ie. microsoft to cloud), but they can leverage their scale and still manage to come to the lead positions.
I think there’s probably a bunch of good opportunities to build good companies with the shift from “onprem” to SaaS. But I’m a lot more excited about the “SaaS/mkt places value proposition” applied to other different problems.
I think SaaS and marketplaces are about:
a) digitalising and making connections easier and/or more convenient (between customer-employee, employees, customer-supplier, etc.)
b) economies of scale of cloud (networking, computing, storage, etc.)
For both aspects, I think we are at the very early stage in almost all industries- and that has a loooot of consequences, but I still need to refine my thinking to be able to publish it.
