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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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