It's hard to talk about infrastructure as a service and Platform as a Service without mentioning software as a service. Software as a Service really doesn't have much to do with virtualization. But given its name, I feel kind of obligated to talk to you about it right now. In fact, Software as a Service predates virtualization, it's been around a while. The cornerstone about software as a service is that instead of having a CD that you buy at the store, or whatever online and sticking it in your computer and installing the software, you instead buy a subscription. And then this subscription allows you to download X number of copies, and do whatever you want to do with them.
So Software as a Service gets rid of optical media and things like that, first of all, which is kind of handy. Now, probably one of the more famous versions of software as a service and something I personally use is Microsoft's office 365. When you write books for a living, I use a lot of Microsoft Word and I'm always moving and changing computers and things like that. I can never keep track of all my optical media. So for me, I just get a subscription I pay, I think it's $99 a year. And I can install office on up to five computers and five tablets.
So for me, it's really convenient. In fact, I can even share one of mine with a family member or something like that. So that's software as a service. Now, I need to be careful here, because the description I just gave you is what I'm thinking that Camtasia is going to use a software as a service. But I'm going to challenge you is something to me, there's a whole other way to look at software as a service. For example, applications like Whoa, I don't know Dropbox.
With Dropbox. I can store stuff online. It is a subscription, I have to subscribe to Dropbox. They don't just let anybody on there. But it has good controls, and I can access my stuff anywhere. So it doesn't really download software onto my computer, but it provides an application a service that I can use anywhere.
So to me things like dress Dropbox, jeez, Google Docs, Google Maps. All of these tools are, in my opinion, also examples of software as a service. So I can't really guarantee which way the company is going to be looking at things. But make sure you understand both ways. I've just described software as a service.