★★After the dot-com bubble burst, startup venture capital dried up, and building web apps became a challenging proposition.*

★★After the dot-com bubble burst, startup venture capital dried up, and building web apps became a challenging proposition. With no money around to hire expensive developers and market the products, even large companies like Microsoft shifted focus to providing tools and infrastructure that enabled and empowered others to build their own SaaS apps.★★

As a result, there was an explosion in open source software, including Ruby on Rails, MySQL/MariaDB, Linux, and Apache, among other things.

This wave of product development democratized access to technology for any developer — whether working at Facebook or Treehouse.

New SaaS startups started cropping up everywhere, leveraging these new-age open source technologies, which are now the backbone of many popular services on the web — YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to name a few.

With the collapse of the tower of babel that was Y2K mania in 2000 and the dot-com bubble in 2001 came opportunity for entrepreneurs like Jason Calacanis (Weblogs Inc.), Mark Cuban, and Marc Andreessen (Netscape Communications Corp.).

The period after 2004 gave rise to some very successful services such as Airbnb, Github, Heroku, Instagram, and Uber, among others.

However, this time around, it wasn't just open-source software powering these fantastic new services but also APIs provided by these companies themselves.

Google Maps greatly simplified building location-based apps while every other service company published their APIs to enable developers to build even more incredible apps on top of them.

✩APIs and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication are at the heart of the current SaaS revolution.✩

Further reading: https://bit.ly/3mLXvBT

The best example to illustrate the present future we live in is:

From allowing people to do tasks more efficiently, technology has progressed to automating procedures entirely, freeing up human capital for more creative activities while computers handle mathematics.

This M2M evolution further pushes data acquisition and processing power towards the edges of networks where devices communicate directly instead of going through a centralized technology hub (servers).

M2M enables SaaS to operate at a scale that was never before possible because it reduces the dependency on humans to perform tasks and minimize human error.

An example of this was Google's self-driving cars which logged over 1 million miles because they use M2M communication to do everything from navigating traffic signals to responding to hand gestures made by other drivers.

Further reading: https://bit.ly/3azUsXE

As per experts, M2M revolution will produce more amazing SaaS products and companies in the future, but only if developers choose modern web technologies over legacy ones.

Further reading: https://tcrn.ch/2YNxb2h

In a future posts, I'll go through SaaS products, APIs and concepts in greater detail.

#apieconomy #apis #saasproduct #saasmanagement #product #productinnovation