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Cloud software returned 30% of engineering
The burden of old versions
Software that ships to customer sites leaves customers scattered across old versions. Engineers fixed bugs on those versions, backported fixes, and supported the customers still running them. Contracts spelled out the terms: version six might stay supported for two years after version seven came out. Everything new also had to stay backward compatible.
What hosting gives back
When the vendor hosts the software, that burden goes away. The product development resources all go toward looking forward, helping the customer solve the next problem and making the product better.
That gives back about 30 percent of the engineering effort, an effect that may have been unintended. SaaS companies have kept pace better than their legacy software counterparts as a result.
Why did customers stay on old software versions?
Upgrading enterprise software meant migrating data, retraining staff, and retesting every customization against the new release. For a large company, that could be a project of its own, so many customers waited. Vendors that wanted those customers to keep paying had to keep releasing fixes for the old versions. Support contracts often ran for years after a newer version appeared.
How do hosted products update every customer at once?
Hosted software runs on the vendor's own servers, so a single deployment changes what every customer sees. Many SaaS companies release changes several times a day through a practice called continuous deployment. Feature flags let a vendor switch new code on for a small share of users first. Rolling back means redeploying the previous version in one place.
Why is backward compatibility so expensive to maintain?
Every new feature has to keep working with the data formats, settings, and integrations that customers built on older releases. Engineers end up keeping old code paths alive next to new ones. Testing multiplies too, because each combination of old and new versions can behave differently. Microsoft Windows has long carried special handling so that very old applications still run.
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