So often I think systems developers lose touch with the systems they put out there.

I'll focus this comment on Software as a Service for the moment. SaaS can be delivered as a single or multi tenant offering. The basic difference is that Single tenant is designed for each individual client/company and hosted in such a way that a change to their software will not affect the software of other client/companies hosted on the same servers. Multi tenant is a one software fits all approach and any change will need to be adopted by all clients/companies who subscribe to that software. The multi tenant approach is becoming ever more popular and is starting to fall under the banner of the "Cloud."

Once again I'm going to narrow my focus down to the Multi tenant offering. This model relies on a large client base who subscribe for a low cost ,subscription based pricing model. There may of course be deviations to this basic pricing model and you can read all about the topic  in William Blares L.L.C.TECHNOLOGY:SOFTWARE & SERVICES September 26,2007Industry Report.

One of the big selling factors for this type of software is that due to the fact that it is used and thus viewed and commented on by so many companies and individuals within those companies "it must work" or else there would be a mass uprising. Well I am sorry to burst your bubble people as with all products there is good Multi tenant software and bad multi tenant software. Most of these application service providers make it extremely difficult to contact them directly. Google who are now wallowing in this space have a reputation for not answering the phones. Linkedin recently had a huge issue with their multi tenant social networking software not working http://getsatisfaction.com/linkedin/topics/new_linkedin_group_issues  and once again it was near impossible to contact them. If you did you were guaranteed a feeble response. I don't mean to point fingers  here and that's not the intent of my post. What I am getting at is that software is still designed, managed and tested by humans. My concern is that we are losing value in this new age of multi tenant software by having the after sales service measured by the actual price paid for the software and not the economies of scale that software company is getting out of all this. They win we lose is not an economic transaction.