I was just catching up on Lars Pind’s software blog and I came across this snippet from John Gruber of Daring Fireball:

“Once software starts down this path of guessing what it is the user is trying to do, and then doing something special based on that guess, it must guess correctly nearly every time, because the times when it guesses wrong are so annoying that they far outweigh the extra convenience of the times when it guesses right.”

The fact that guess work is not necessary in SAAS feedback driven software developement is a boon for users and developers alike.  Now it’s common sense (i.e. “what do we build next?”) that is the x factor for many software services.

I went on to comment on Lars’ blog as follows:

“…this is the beauty of software development in the ASP/web2 landscape…you get so much – and such direct – feedback from users that you can make the right move almost all of the time.

Developing software pre a web enabled instant feedback loop was infinitely harder because of the distance between developers and users. SAAS closes that gap and benefits both parties.”

Updated: I elaborated on this post, over at the FreshBooks blog in a post called, “Why We Are Better“.