Thanks for the comment Locke1689. You make some excellent points.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I'm the Head of Marketing for Rypple.)
Rypple itself may be young, but the guys who co-founded it are very experienced in the world of traditional, capital-E, Enterprise software. They were the head of sales and marketing at Workbrain, which they grew to $100m in revenue providing serious Enterprise solutions to the biggest companies in the world. They intimately understand how this world works and so they are well qualified to say that our approach is a much better one.
You're absolutely right about it being easier when you're SaaS. We're confident that this is not a fad, for the very reasons you mention. Salesforce.com is hardly a startup anymore and is a significant player in the Enterprise space with an entirely SaaS-based solution. The next version of Office is rumored to be a Cloud solution. Even consumer-focused products like the AppleTV have gone from client-side storage to the Cloud.
The strongest reaction to this post is around the idea of removing features, with lots of people saying "You can't do that!" and "Your customers will revolt!". We get that. It's the natural reaction after years of building software in the traditional way. Here's the thing though: our customers celebrate when we take features out. We get emails from them thanking us for keeping the app simple and jettisoning the cruft. We sometimes pull something out that we do get a strong reaction to, and then we work closely with the users who felt strongly to make the feature awesome and put it back in.
Rypple itself may be young, but the guys who co-founded it are very experienced in the world of traditional, capital-E, Enterprise software. They were the head of sales and marketing at Workbrain, which they grew to $100m in revenue providing serious Enterprise solutions to the biggest companies in the world. They intimately understand how this world works and so they are well qualified to say that our approach is a much better one.
I didn't mean to insinuate that the companies are somehow unqualified to make those judgements. It's usually the armchair experts that make these kind of comments. When I referred to the young age of the company I was really referring to the company model itself instead of the people inside. I wish you the best of luck but my point was mainly that knowledge and acumen are great, but when it gets down to it the proof is in the pudding. I hope you guys will still be here in 10-15 years and it will be great if you are and the model does scale into the long term, but I think it's premature to say it's definitely succeeded before the eggs have hatched.
The strongest reaction to this post is around the idea of removing features, with lots of people saying "You can't do that!" and "Your customers will revolt!". We get that. It's the natural reaction after years of building software in the traditional way. Here's the thing though: our customers celebrate when we take features out. We get emails from them thanking us for keeping the app simple and jettisoning the cruft. We sometimes pull something out that we do get a strong reaction to, and then we work closely with the users who felt strongly to make the feature awesome and put it back in.
I think this really depends. Mainly it depends on what kinds of features you're removing. One thing I'd really caution against is changing your API every couple months. That is the kind of thing that can drive your company into a hole they can't crawl out of.
