ServiceNow Stock Tumbles 50% in a Year: Good Earnings Don't Stop 'Death of SaaS'(www.salesforceben.com)
32 pointsby xnx9 days ago4 comments
  • piloto_ciego9 days ago
    I literally quit my job because of how much I hated working in ServiceNow. It's the worst platform I've ever had the misfortune to be forced to used. I was trying to get people to let me build replacement tools - there was so much stuff that we were paying out the ass for that we absolutely did not need with ServiceNow. It's really expensive and extremely poorly designed and you need specialized people just to maintain it. At a certain point, it makes a lot more sense to roll your own, maintain your own, and not let some company bleed you dry.
    • dd8601fn9 days ago
      > At a certain point, it makes a lot more sense to roll your own, maintain your own, and not let some company bleed you dry.

      Everyone has this thought, at some point, about any serious software. Then they try rolling their own and realize they were relying on a LOT more than they thought they were, and every change someone asks for WOULD have been checking a checkbox in what they already had.

      Also, now you traded your "specialized" people for only one or two people on earth who are familiar with a bespoke application.

      It's closely related to the, "just make it work like Excel" problem in software development... seems like a simple 80/20 thing until someone is literally trying to remake excel from scratch inside every bullshit little application.

      • spwa48 days ago
        But there's 2 problems with that.

        First, ServiceNow itself is an Oracle imitation. A Salesforce imitation. A SAP imitation (a very bad SAP imitation), an IBM Remedy (dear GOD do I HATE IBM remedy) with as it's one "advantage" that it supports automation a bit better, you could even say these are MS Access/Dynamics imitations.

        And at least you could say that (deep) under the covers Oracle and SAP have excellent software. ServiceNow does not.

        Second, ServiceNow SUCKS. I mean it's not quite as bad as IBM Remedy, but it really, really tries.

        I like to say that most of this software is like mounting a big, heavy metal spike on the wall and then hitting your head constantly, repeatedly, as hard as you possibly can, against the point. With one important difference: unlike with IBM Remedy, when hitting your head hard on a big metal spike, the pain stops after a while.

        • piloto_ciego6 days ago
          This was my experience too. And, like, so what if we have company specific knowledge that has to be learned on the job? I get that companies want to view employees as motor oil, but you're not going to have to work to maintain shit in a world where you can just point Claude at the codebase and ask for a feature.

          "Oh, the new VP of marketing wants a dashboard that shows widget sales on the X axis and his marketing budget on the Y-axis? Ok." And Claude will whip it up - and yeah, it's a totally stupid metric that probably doesn't mean anything. But it's what they want, so they'll make it happen and draw spurious conclusions from it. Hell, at my old job it took me a year to convince people that the time series we were analyzing wasn't correlated to anything - it literally (when you calculated the autocorrelation of the seasonally differenced data) was no different than random noise. But we still had to run the report. How much of the economy is that sort of nonsense? Meanwhile, service now couldn't even conveniently calculate a median...

        • esseph6 days ago
          Remedy is BMC Helix, not IBM
  • malshe9 days ago
    I have heard a few analysts mentioning that software stocks are under the threat of AI. Apparently now anyone can build enterprise software in their pajamas using AI. To the extent that this ridiculous reasoning is driving the stocks down, I think it presents a good buying opportunity. But one has to wait until the bleeding slows down a bit.
    • basch9 days ago
      it might be more that business process can become a plain text word document, that modifying the program requires only describing the change in plain language, that the user interface to show information becomes unnecessary when you can just ask any question, that data can be loose and unstructured, even stored as images, and interpreted on the fly.

      the general purpose chatbot plus a "how to" does replace needing to build esoteric specialized workflows.

      • subscribed9 days ago
        Now can you explain how do you replace Service Now (service management tool cursed with the ticketing system) with a flat text file.

        If it's a compelling proposal, I might share it in my company. I'll make sure to credit you in the document.

        Of course in line with your radical complexity savings, I expect the comprehensive proposal to be at most one paragraph long :)

        • basch7 days ago
          To replace a legacy ticketing monolith like ServiceNow with a text-based LLM pipeline, you should transition to a "GitOps for Service Management" model: replace form-based entries with a central, version-controlled Markdown or JSONL repository where every ticket is a discrete text file containing structured metadata (tags, timestamps, status) and unstructured conversation logs. These files are monitored by a CI/CD pipeline that triggers a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) indexing process, allowing a fine-tuned LLM to serve as the primary interface for querying historical solutions, generating automated responses, or updating ticket states via natural language commits. By treating the service desk as a living document store rather than a relational database, you eliminate UI friction and enable the LLM to act as the "logic layer" that categorizes, routes, and resolves issues directly from the raw text stream.
  • esseph9 days ago
    This is a huge deal in the US Enterprise space.

    ServiceNow is not exactly the Operating System that companies run by (arguably ITIL or other frameworks), but its operation is (arguably) critical to making those kind of business systems work.

  • ares6239 days ago
    > The only major SaaS stock that is on the up is Oracle, with a 4% increase in stock price over the last year.

    Someone wrote that with a straight face. It almost feels like the whole article's purpose was to sneak that line in there.