Consumer VCs like to make light of the Founders Fund mantra ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ For those of us working in the enterprise, it’s actually the reverse, “They promised us 140 characters, instead we got Workday.”
Since 2010, SaaS applications were supposed to “consumerize”, but as anyone who has used the majority of SaaS applications released prior to 2014 knows, they are still clunky, punishing interfaces that happen to be hosted in someone else’s datacenter. 2014 is proving to be the year where this changes, with a large wave of new-generation SaaS apps that really deliver on a delightful user experience. Employees and managers are taking notice of these new user-friendly tools, causing adoption to explode from the bottoms up.