This is Martin Kleppmann, author of Designing Data Intensive Applications, talking about Local-First Software.
There was a paper by Ink&Switch back in 2019 on local-first software, but in this talk Kleppmann extrapolates in some really interesting ways.
Local-first software isn’t just peer-to-peer software, or software that uses CRDTs. Much more bombastically, Kleppmann quotes Leslie Lamport:
a distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable (1987)
And goes on to say that local-first software is software built so that, if the developer of the software went out of business, users could still run and use the software.
Imagine if Oracle went out of business and you could still use Oracle db.
This breaks the SaaS paradigm entirely, because traditional SaaS has its moat around data and hosting, not just the innate quality of the software’s design and function.
It’s hard for me as a software engineer/architect to imagine exactly what this “local-first software looks like, and what exactly the economics of this are, but this talk (and the preceding paper) are worth a watch.