Category: internet

Software Is Eating the World — But SaaS Is Full of People Who Don’t Know What They’re Doing

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Digital Innovation, internet, TechLeave a comment

A decade after Andreessen’s famous proclamation, software has indeed consumed the world. SaaS has become the default delivery model for everything from billing systems to meditation apps. But in this new age of infinite tools and endless funding, something strange has happened:

SaaS has grown faster than our collective understanding of what good software actually is.

While the industry is flooded with capital and hype, it’s also riddled with shallow execution, misaligned incentives, and a troubling lack of real expertise.

This isn’t about gatekeeping. It’s about calling out a culture where too many people are building businesses they don’t fully understand, solving problems they never deeply explored, and scaling software they never stress-tested.

Let’s unpack the hidden delusions inside the modern SaaS ecosystem.

🧩 1. Confusing “Product” with “Platform”

Everyone wants to be a platform. But most SaaS tools shouldn’t be.

A true platform offers extensibility, ecosystem integration, and network effects. But many tools labeled “platforms” are actually narrow, single-purpose apps with shallow APIs and brittle infrastructure.

Why? Because it sounds better in a pitch.

We need fewer “platforms” and more focused, opinionated tools that solve real user problems elegantly and completely.

🧪 2. Building for Funding, Not for Users

Too many SaaS startups are designed for the pitch deck, not the end-user. Roadmaps become theater. Features are rushed to hit fundraising milestones. Product-market fit is simulated with ad budgets, not traction.

This misalignment means that what gets built isn’t necessarily what’s needed—it’s what investors want to hear.

Result: bloated tools, artificial retention loops, and disillusioned users.

🛠 3. MVP Culture Has Gone Too Far

Yes, “ship fast” is still a good principle. But MVP culture has metastasized into minimal everything—minimal thought, minimal quality, minimal understanding.

An MVP is meant to be a starting point. But too often it becomes the product. Corners stay cut. Infrastructure remains fragile. UX is forever “temporary.”

Craftsmanship is replaced by velocity. But real products demand both.

🔁 4. Feature Creep Without Problem Depth

SaaS teams love adding features, but few truly go deep into user problems. The goal becomes parity with competitors, not innovation.

  • Need analytics? Add a dashboard.
  • Need stickiness? Add gamification.
  • Need AI? Plug in ChatGPT.

But layering on features without understanding workflows results in clunky, complex, hard-to-love products.

🧃 5. Over-Indexed on Design, Under-Indexed on Durability

Modern SaaS looks beautiful. Smooth gradients, clean interfaces, polished landing pages.

But under the hood?

  • Fragile backends
  • Poor scalability
  • Technical debt disguised as “agility”
  • Critical user paths breaking at scale

Design wins the first impression. Reliability wins long-term trust.

💸 6. Everyone’s a Buyer, No One’s a User

One of the most ironic problems in SaaS: buyers and users are rarely the same person. This leads to mismatched priorities.

  • Sales builds for decision-makers.
  • Product tries to satisfy end-users.
  • Marketing sells simplicity, while onboarding delivers complexity.

When users are treated as a secondary audience, churn becomes inevitable.

💬 7. Sales-Led, but Product-Starved

SaaS companies often scale sales faster than product maturity. This results in:

  • Over-promised features
  • Broken onboarding experiences
  • High CAC and low LTV
  • Burned trust and canceled renewals

Selling a vision is easy. Delivering value takes time, context, and care.

🤖 8. Throwing AI at Problems They Don’t Understand

The rise of LLMs and AI APIs has introduced a new wave of “AI-powered” SaaS that adds automation without insight.

It’s not that AI isn’t useful—it’s that many teams are solving symptoms, not root causes. Automating bad UX doesn’t make it better. Suggesting actions doesn’t replace strategy.

AI should enhance understanding—not distract from the lack of it.

⚠️ 9. The Talent Mismatch

The SaaS boom attracted brilliant minds—but it also attracted opportunists.

Today we have:

  • Founders who’ve never been customers of the space they’re building in
  • Product managers driven by velocity over vision
  • Engineers building for abstractions, not real users
  • Designers focused on UI kits, not usability

This talent mismatch leads to a graveyard of tools that “look right” but don’t work in the wild.

💡 10. What Real SaaS Needs Now

We don’t need more SaaS.

We need:

  • Deeper understanding of specific problems
  • Domain experts leading product direction
  • Technologists with humility, not just ambition
  • Craftsmanship, not speed addiction
  • Companies that grow slower—but smarter

The future of SaaS belongs to those who build quietly, patiently, and expertly. Those who obsess not over scale, but over substance.

🧠 Conclusion: SaaS Needs Its Reality Check

Yes, software is eating the world.
But some of it is junk food.

It’s time for a recalibration.
The next generation of SaaS companies will be built not by people chasing trends, but by those who actually know what they’re doing.

Because in an industry where anyone can build anything, the most valuable thing you can offer is depth.

From Dot-Com to Decentralized: The Untold History of Web

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Blockchain, internet, Web 3.0Leave a comment

The internet, since its inception, has evolved in stages — from a static collection of documents to an interactive web of platforms and, now, to a decentralized, user-owned ecosystem. The latest phase, known as Web3, is not just a technological leap, but a philosophical shift in how we perceive ownership, identity, and value on the internet. To understand the future Web3 aims to shape, it is essential to understand where it came from — and why.

Web3 is often positioned as the successor to Web1 and Web2, but it is far more than a linear upgrade. Web1, the original internet of the 1990s and early 2000s, was a read-only experience. Users could browse static web pages, read information, and perhaps send an email, but the infrastructure was decentralized and open. Anyone with a basic understanding of HTML could build and publish. It was the age of personal websites, forums, and informational repositories like early Wikipedia. Users owned their content because they hosted it.

By the mid-2000s, Web2 emerged — bringing with it interactivity, social media, and the era of centralized platforms. It transformed users from passive consumers to active participants. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter empowered users to create and share content easily. However, these innovations came with a tradeoff: centralized control. Users provided content, but corporations harvested and monetized the data. Power, both technical and economic, became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants.

The seeds of Web3 were planted as a reaction to this centralization. The 2008 financial crisis played a pivotal role in this shift. Trust in traditional institutions had eroded, and the release of the Bitcoin white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto offered a radical alternative — a peer-to-peer financial system that required no intermediaries. Bitcoin was more than a digital currency; it was a movement. It demonstrated that decentralized systems could function without centralized control or trust, secured instead by cryptography and consensus mechanisms.

The principles behind Bitcoin — decentralization, transparency, trustlessness — became the philosophical foundation of Web3. The subsequent development of Ethereum in 2015, spearheaded by Vitalik Buterin and others, took the concept further. Ethereum introduced smart contracts — self-executing code deployed on the blockchain — enabling developers to build decentralized applications (dApps). This was the beginning of Web3 as we know it today: an internet where users could not only read and write but also own.

Ownership in Web3 is both literal and symbolic. On-chain assets like cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and tokenized governance rights allow users to have a stake in the platforms they use. Unlike Web2, where user content is monetized by platforms, Web3 enables a model where users are stakeholders — participating in value creation and governance. For example, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) emerged as a novel structure for collective ownership, decision-making, and funding, all encoded transparently on the blockchain.

The Web3 movement also brought forward innovations in identity. Instead of using centralized login systems owned by Google or Facebook, users in Web3 authenticate via wallets like MetaMask, using public-private key cryptography. This wallet becomes their identity across decentralized apps, preserving anonymity while enabling provable ownership and reputation. Furthermore, projects like ENS (Ethereum Name Service) and decentralized identity protocols aim to give users portable digital identities that they control.

Despite its promise, Web3 has faced significant challenges. Scalability, user experience, regulatory uncertainty, and environmental concerns (particularly with proof-of-work systems) have all slowed mainstream adoption. Ethereum’s early years were plagued by congestion and high gas fees, which led to the rise of competing blockchains like Solana, Avalanche, and Polkadot — all of which aim to provide more scalable and efficient infrastructures.

The NFT boom of 2021 marked Web3’s first major pop culture moment. Suddenly, blockchain was no longer just about finance — it was about art, music, gaming, and digital expression. However, the ensuing bubble also revealed the speculative excesses in the space, as well as the need for better user education, legal frameworks, and long-term value creation.

Web3 also intersects with broader technological and societal shifts. It complements the rise of edge computing, AI, and the metaverse. In fact, some envision the metaverse — an immersive, persistent digital universe — as being natively Web3, where assets are interoperable and economies are owned by the participants, not platforms. Companies like Yuga Labs (behind Bored Ape Yacht Club), Decentraland, and The Sandbox are early experiments in that direction.

As of 2025, Web3 remains both a buzzword and a battleground. Traditional tech companies are integrating blockchain technology, often in ways that dilute its decentralized ethos. Meanwhile, governments are introducing legislation to tame the anarchic nature of Web3, from crypto taxation laws to outright bans or heavy licensing. The tension between decentralization and compliance is one of the defining issues of Web3’s evolution.

At its core, Web3 is not just about blockchains or tokens — it’s a vision of a more equitable internet. It represents an ideological realignment with the original spirit of the web: open, permissionless, and user-first. But realizing that vision at scale is a monumental challenge, requiring breakthroughs in scalability, UX design, privacy-preserving technologies, and above all, governance.

Web3’s history is still being written. Like any paradigm shift, it is met with skepticism, resistance, and growing pains. But just as Web1 gave birth to Google and Web2 gave birth to Facebook, Web3 will produce its own transformative giants — not necessarily companies, but perhaps protocols, collectives, and communities that reshape how we interact, transact, and belong online.

Would you pay a ransom for your cup of joe?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn CyberSecurity, internetLeave a comment

If you’re a gadget-loving person, and you enjoy your coffee, then there is a very good chance that you have a coffee machine. However, I don’t suppose you’ve ever thought it might be a cybersecurity threat.

Davey Winder, a tech journalist, points caffeine addicts in the direction of a new report by security research firm Avasti, which as discovered, “smart coffee machines can not only be hacked but can be hacked with ransomware.”

One of Avasti’s senior researchers, Martin Hron, wrote in a recent blog, “The fresh smell of ransomed coffee”, about how he proved a myth was true when he turned a “coffee maker into a dangerous machine asking for ransom by modifying the maker’s firmware.”

Proving a myth

Hron goes on to say:”I was asked to prove a myth, call it a suspicion, that the threat to IoT devices is not just to access them via a weak router or exposure to the internet, but that an IoT device itself is vulnerable and can be easily owned without owning the network or the router.”

What Hron discovered was that the coffee machine acted as a Wi-Fi access point when switched on. This then established an unencrypted, unsecured connection to a companion app. From that point he was able to explore the machine’s firmware update mechanism, finding that because the updates were unencrypted, no authentication code was required. Hron, behaving as a hacker would, then reverse engineered the firmware stored in the machine’s Android app.

Crypto or coffee?

Perhaps you’ll smile at what Hron tried to do next. He attempted to turn the coffee machine into a cryptocurrency mining machine, something he found would be possible, although also impossibly slow due to the CPU speed. What he did instead, was perhaps more dramatic. Imagine your coffee machine starts making an ear-splitting noise and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Hron created a noise malfunction that could only be stopped by paying a ransom, or pulling the plug on your morning coffee forever.

A noisy attack

He effectively produced a ransomware attack that nobody could ignore. Winder writes, “The trigger for the attack was the command that connects the machine to the network, and the payload some malicious code that “renders the coffee maker unusable and asks for a ransom.”

Hrom also went a bit further. He inserted code that permanently turned on the hotbed and water heater as well as the coffee grinder.

If you have a coffee machine connected to the Internet, you are probably safe, but it’s useful to know that these machines can be attacked. But I do wonder, would you pay the ransom to have your smart coffee machine return to normal breakfast duties, or would you pull the plug and go back to an old skool method of brewing up a cup of joe?

The 5G Conspiracy Theorists Making Money Out of Covid-19!

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Covid - 19, internetLeave a comment

If you have been following social media during this pandemic, and it’s hard to avoid it, you may have noticed that conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus are multiplying like weeds.

The general consensus is that it leapt to humans from a bat, or a pangolin, but even the leading scientists have questioned what was initially assumed about Wuhan’s wet market as being the source.

But the conspiracy theorists aren’t content with that. It’s not exciting enough for them presumably, plus was there ever a better opportunity for them to jump on all the social media channels and announce the ‘truth’!

One of the most prevalent theories is that the virus is related to the rollout of 5G Internet technology. Apparently, while we are all in lockdown, new 5G towers are being installed while we’re not looking. That’s just one aspect of it. The other is that the 5G technology is responsible for spreading the virus worldwide?

How could technology do this? Well, according to the conspiracy, there is no virus. The images you have seen of people dying in hospital beds is part of one big hoax. Instead it is 5G technology that is causing the symptoms.

Another variation of the conspiracy theory asserts that radiation from 5G can weaken your immune system to the point that you are more easily infected by COVID-19. After all, the same people have been saying for months that 5G will basically fry your brain.

It’s hard to imagine, is it not, that all the medics, nurses and scientists have been colluding in an elaborate illusion, just to ensure that we think people are ill or dying from the virus?

The conspiracy theorists work from the rather basic principle that since Covid-19 started in China, and so did the 5G rollout, which apparently means 5G is the real source of the worst pandemic any of us have seen. Some have even tried to create timelines connecting the emergence of radio waves in 1916 as the precursor of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and to connect the introduction of 3G with SARS and 4G with swine flu, before we get to 5G.

Even some news broadcasters have pandered to the idea, showing maps of %G tower installations and claiming there are more Covid cases in these areas. However, this doesn’t support 5G as being the cause. There may be many other factors in those areas contributing to the number of infections, primary among them socio-economics and population density.

And in other fake news, somebody tried to claim that the new Bank of England £20 note features a 5G tower and a symbol for Covid-19. Apart form the Queen, it features the artist J.M.W. Turner. The ‘5G tower’ is actually Margate Lighthouse, a favourite place of the artist, and the so-called Covid symbol represents a staircase at Tate Britain, which houses many of Turner’s works. Just so we’ve cleared that one up.

That hasn’t stopped people from vandalising 5G towers and attacking telecoms workers in the UK and elsewhere. As Forbes contributor Bruce Y. Lee says, “In fact, these 5G-COVID-19 conspiracy theories has gotten so rampant that U.K. government officials actually have had to take time to discredit such theories, which is a wonderful use of time during a public health emergency.”

Making money from the 5G conspiracy

Of course, somebody is benefitting from the 5G conspiracy: Ryan Broderick at Buzzfeed says people are paying $350 for a USB stick that is a ‘bioshield’ against 5G. The vendor, Jacques Bauer, “falsely claims protects people from 5G radiation by converting it into beneficial radiation.” And there are others who have jumped on the same bandwagon, as Broderick rightly names and shames them.

It’s consumer abuse at any time, but while people are dying in the hundreds of thousands worldwide, it is utterly disgraceful to capitalise on people’s fear in this way. In the months to come, people will want answers about how this pandemic truly unfolded, and I’m willing to bet that the experts won’t say, “It was 5G.” However, like the anti-vaxxers (a lot of the 5G conspiracists belong in that camp as well), those who are convinced 5G caused Covid-19 will probably not go away. The best thing we can do is to ignore them.