Blue Ocean SaaS
We're heading in exactly the opposite direction.
Disruption has a dual meaning. One is the neighbor with a taste for loud heavy metal disrupting your sleep. The other is the business meaning defined by the late Prof. Clayton Christensen. Put simply, small things do the task that big things do for less cost until people switch to the small thing, which becomes the norm. Thanks to time, AI, and the end of COVID, we are seeing the end stage of that mess with calendaring and video conferencing.
The neighbor disrupts by forcing unwanted noise into your private space. SaaS marketers are now doing the same thing. They are disrupting the user experience with feature noise that nobody requested.
The setup question
Do you keep a calendar by Google, Outlook, Apple, or something else? Video calls by Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, or something else? Most readers will answer “all of them, depending on the meeting.” That is the problem in one sentence.
These systems were meant to be interoperable
The technical specs for calendars and video calls that work across platforms were settled long ago. iCalendar (RFC 5545) is open. CalDAV is open. WebRTC is open. Every system has APIs. Every system does the same thing. And yet they are all islands.
Why they are islands
Marketing dark patterns want to keep you locked in. The interop is technically trivial and deliberately broken. Subscribe to a Google calendar in Apple Calendar and the colors do not survive. Try to dial a Zoom from Teams and you cannot. Accept a Google invite in Outlook and the Meet link sometimes goes missing. Schedule a meeting from Bangalore to Austin and the timezone field will quietly disagree with the displayed time, leaving you to do the arithmetic in your head while half awake. Each system competes once at acquisition and then degrades the experience for years because switching costs are the moat. The lock-in is not a bug. It is the business model.
Value down, cost up: the late SaaS game
I write a lot about value and cost and where cost can increase while value decreases. SaaS in its late stage is a clean example. Anybody who has worked with Zoom lately knows there are more options than at the Cheesecake Factory, and yet the vast majority of people simply want to create a video conference.
The product that was great in 2019 because it was simple and fast is now Zoom Mail, Zoom Calendar, Zoom Phone, Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Notes, Zoom Docs, Zoom Clips, Zoom AI Companion, and Zoom Workplace. Each addition defends a revenue line. None of them improves the core experience of “click link, see person, talk.”
Calendaring is the same story in a different costume. Am I free for this meeting at this time in this timezone? Yes or no, and schedule. That is it. Yet thanks to disparate systems and timezone fields that lie about themselves, this has become a common cognitive tax. What was once the disruptor now looks ready to be disrupted.
The pattern, named
Successful tools that do one thing well get pulled toward becoming suites once growth slows. A focused tool has a price ceiling. A suite has higher willingness to pay per seat. The economic gravity of the public company quarterly cycle always wins against the engineering instinct to keep things simple. Slack added Lists and Canvases. Notion added databases and AI and forms. Dropbox tried to become a productivity company. The user experience erodes predictably. Software gets worse as companies get more successful at extracting value from it.
This is the predictable output of the SaaS business model meeting public market revenue expectations. The product strategy that maximizes shareholder value is identical to the product strategy that alienates the core user. The two converge until a disruptor shows up.
Why GenAI accelerates this
The underlying calendar, the underlying video stream, and the underlying email are all commodities. What matters increasingly is the layer above them. What is on my plate today? Summarize this meeting. Draft a reply.
If a neutral AI layer can answer those questions across any platform, the platform becomes the backend. The interface moves up a layer. The walled garden survives only as long as nothing can read across the walls. AI can read across the walls.
This is why every incumbent is racing to build their own AI inside their walled garden. Google Gemini in Workspace, Microsoft Copilot in Teams, Zoom AI Companion, Apple Intelligence. They are racing because a neutral assistant breaks the lock-in. Users did not ask for any of it.
What the disruptor looks like
If the assistant layer is where the value moves, the disruptor is whoever owns it. Christensen would predict it will be cheaper, simpler, and initially viewed as inadequate by the incumbent’s best customers.
It will operate above the platform layer, not at it. It will treat the underlying calendar, video, and email as commodity backends. It will solve the question the user actually has without caring which platform the data lives in. It will lose every feature comparison and win on the only thing that matters: doing the job. Plain text scheduling. A simple notification layer. No bundle. No upsell. It will charge less than the suite because it does not have to maintain the suite.
Closing
What was once disruptive becomes incumbent. What was once a sharp tool becomes a Swiss Army knife with too many blades. What was once “fast and simple” becomes “fast, simple, plus fifteen things you did not ask for, plus a price increase, plus an AI assistant trying to upsell you.” People want value typically in the form of less friction to match the expected output. Companies want lower cost, hopefully by removing cost that does not add buyer value. Aiming that lower cost/higher value offering at both customers and noncustomers of a current offering is the path towards a blue ocean. And yet, we’re seeing exactly the opposite become the norm.