Hello there! today we're going to be looking at an exclusive product offering, ironically, when people think about exclusive products and services, they're imagining something super expensive 😅, the industry I'm going to be talking about today is exclusive because it requires esoteric knowledge as your ticket in. Over time, we've had business models like B2B (Business to Business), B2C (Business to customers), B2G (Business to Governments) and in some cases, B2B2G or B2B2C (I'm not going to get into those 😂). I do feel that we're overdue for B2D(Business to Developers).
UNDERSTANDING PaaS
I'm done whetting your appetite, let's eat 😋. Today we'll be looking at Platform as a Service (PaaS). Recall that we recently looked at SaaS (Software as a Service), well PaaS is somewhat related to SaaS in the sense that PaaS can be said to enable the existence of SaaS. PaaS companies are organizations that provide infrastructure and software solutions that are accessible via the good old internet and are used by developers and development teams to build software solutions for the greater good and to save the world! 😁.
Just like SaaS (and most things on the internet), PaaS is relatively cheap to acquire, anyone who wants them can get them yet they're not built to appeal to the mainstream public and this is because these things are somewhat difficult to learn how to use. Popular examples of PaaS are Microsoft Azure, Salesforce Lightning, Oracle cloud, AWS Lamda, etc. If you notice, these products don't exactly ring a bell, and it's because they're not marketed the way Coca-Cola is marketed 😅 because the average netizen doesn't directly need them.
A RELATABLE EXPLANATION
To use PaaS one has to go through a steep learning curve that is financially rewarding in the end, for most netizens, SaaS is enough. One thing that you'll notice is that the top tech companies in the world are directly involved in the PaaS, SaaS and/or IaaS industries. For tech companies to grow at scale, they don't just have to offer a product, they have to be able to encourage professionals to create more products based on the tech company's product and this requires the creation of an enabling environment for development.
For context, look at how viral content leverages social media platforms like Tik Tok. Imagine for a second what Android would look like if software engineers didn't make most of those apps we see on the Play Store, check the Blackberry store for context 🤣. Tech organizations that scale and become household names are those that are able to enlist the patronage of not just the average consumers but also developers, this is why terms like Open Source is a big deal these days.
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT DYNAMICS
In our developer world, companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc, compete fiercely for the attention of software engineers, all the above companies have at least one programming language and software programming framework that they use for development. The organization with more popular languages and frameworks end up with more products that their environment supports.
Eg, if Google's Java/Kotlin is attracting a lot of developers, more android apps will be built and it helps the Google Play Store, also web platforms can be built with these languages, and all of these makes it easier for Google to sell their IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions. Software programming languages and tools are mostly free to use (by developers), the languages are bait.
FINALLY
A lot of languages and frameworks have died in recent time because developers stopped using them as much. The companies that own these languages also went the way of dinosaurs. This is why top tech companies will fight hard to get a lot of developers to use their tools and PaaS solutions even if it's a loss leader strategy.