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Last week, I wrote a
post in which I argued that SaaS will reduce software piracy. In this post,
I am going to talk about an issue that is culturally important in many
countries. Rather, I am going to raise an important question which SaaS vendors
should ponder as they plan to extend their business to markets from around the
world. In a way, this is a non-issue but it matters in many countries around the
world.
In the traditional software world, many families share a single PC and the
software installed in the PC is shared by all members of the family. Most of the
software were licensed for use in a particular machine and the number of people
using the machine didn’t matter much. An entire family could be using the
same machine with Windows XP amd Office 2003. A friend could be using your
Laptop during one of the brainstorming sessions you had with him/her and he
might be using the photoshop installed on your laptop. Such usage
didn’t elicit any cries of piracy and everything was going smooth in the society
during desktop era. In many countries, sharing computing resources with the
close family or friends is a culturally acceptable way of doing things and, in fact, in some
places not sharing the computing resources is even considered to be rude. There
were cries of piracy only when proprietary commercial software were sold
illegally or made available for download through warez sites or bittorrent.
With the evolution of SaaS to the mainstream, it will be interesting to see
how this idea of sharing shapes up with this new paradigm shift. In the SaaS
world, the accounts for various apps are associated with a single person and
not the desktop or the browser. This means that users cannot share the same account
with anyone else even if they are part of the user’s close family like spouse or
children. In some Asian countries, it is a socially acceptable norm for the
entire family to know the email password of the family members and use their
account to send/receive emails. In fact, it is a social norm to share the
passwords of email accounts even with the friends. Sharing the password between
husband and wife is even considered as a social requirement for bonding. For
many people in the western world, this may be amusing but it is part
of the social norms in many other countries, especially some of the eastern ones.
Enforcing the “only one person per account” requirement might be relatively
easy in the free and freemium models. It is not very difficult to convince users
to let the other person create another account at no cost and use it. However,
it becomes difficult, and in some cases impossible, to implement when the
users are asked to pay for the SaaS applications without any options to have a
free account. In fact, even with the free/freemium model, we cannot force the
users to not share the password without the risk of appearing to be culturally
insensitive. However, allowing users to share a single account will end up
creating security, privacy and ownership nightmares. The role of the vendors
becomes crucial when such issues comes into play. This ends up creating a
dilemma for vendors. On one side, they have to take into account the cultural
and social sensitivities when implementing the “one account one person” policy
and, on the other hand, attempts by the vendors to overlook this requirement
might result in security, privacy and ownership issues.
I am still not sure how it is going to play out as we move more and more into
using SaaS applications. It may just be a non-issue.
But, as someone who lives in both the eastern and western parts of the world at different times of the year, I tend to think
that this is an issue which vendors will confront sooner than later as they
continue to do business in this internet enabled globalized economy.
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