According to Lawson's CEO SaaS is a dead end game. You always have to take these types of articles with a grain of salt, but in this case I think that Mr. Debes has it wrong.

In fact, it is rather amusing that Larry Dunivan's blog talks positively about their software categorized as SaaS. You can certainly argue that any bloging is just marketing and doesn't qualify as a product, but I still find it amusing to see two different messages coming out of the company.

Once you examine Mr. Debes' comments a little more closely you can see that he is in fact marketing his ERP product, which if you've ever seen, touched, run away from, an ERP is most likely huge, complex, and very expensive. I've never used Lawson's product so I can't speak to its characteristics. I'm just generalizing.

When your product line costs significant amounts of overhead to build and maintain the "cost" of easily losing a customer becomes a serious problem. Mr. Debes understands that and wants his customers to be locked in to his product.

If you are working on a SaaS product line, you should be away of the points Mr. Debes makes. You need to consider both how easy it is for your customers to leave you and also how much it costs you to create your software. If the cost is too high, or the ability to exit it too easy, you run the risk of never seeing a stable profit.