The current licensing model isn't friendly at all if you're thinking on making your SharePoint product available as a Cloud SaaS.

To go Cloud, this must needed change must occur so that the SharePoint (and its ecosystem required products) licensing model to fit well with SaaS business models without an obscene entry cost in licensing that crushes your initial investment as an ISV.

We have this product that we developed, and it requires SharePoint Server.

We’ve been considering for some time now the possibility of making our product also available as a SaaS.

However, as SharePoint Server is a requirement – the available licensing options pose a direct problem to this business model when you start onboarding customers.

We all know the poor track record of SharePoint updates (security and non-security) when it comes to quality, still the updates are pushed via Windows Update causing all kinds of issues on on-premises farms.

Most common scenario is that IT doesn't really understand SharePoint, so they allow updates via WSUS (or just install them directly) to one or all servers of the farm, causing all kinds of "by-design" issues, as SharePoint Config Wizard needs to be executed to get the farm working properly again, OR the patch first needs to be installed on all SharePoint servers to make it work properly. I don't believe "train your IT" is a valid argument to this as it just keeps on occurring all the time, everywhere. It's like saying "don't crash to other vehicles" and wonder why there still are car crashes.

Another (all too common) scenario is that update itself causes issues in SharePoint, and there is total radio silence from MS side as to what happened, how to fix it, when a possible fix is done.

So, please do not push SharePoint updates (security or non-security) via Windows Update.

Content types:

Enable content type-based default values in addition to site column-based and location-based default values. Allow farm administrators to specify which takes priority in cases of conflict (and make them function reagardless of if the user creates a new document from the ribbon, uploads it or drag-and-drops it into the library)

Enable all and any sharepoint columns to be displayed, and when applicable edited, from within the document (not just in the ribbon). For example give us the option to automatically propagate your new unique farm-wide document ID-based url in the actual document content. would be fantastic for users that need to print out the document to be able to have a non location-based URL.

Content Type Hub:

Allow some way of specifying if and when a site Collection should inherit Changes from the CTH rather than the only option being prior to each CT subscriber job specifying on each and every site Collection, that yes I want those changes this time also.

Instead of resulting in a synchronization-conflict or creating duplicate content types, allow renaming of conent types on subscribing sites by changing the content type name (or column names for that matter) in the CTH and resynching them.

Do not! Do not send out a new copy of every template-file that has ever been associated with a content type to each and every subscribing site on every content type subscriber timer job. In fact do not send out actual documents at all. instead reference them from a managed template library. I know it is possible in 2013 as well although less than intuitive or even documented.

Give us an option to exclude synchronising all my sites (unless we specify that we want them included).

When I want to know the time and date that something was Created or Modified I require a bit of standardized precision.
e.g. [5/31/2017 7:33 PM] (actually, I'd prefer the ISO standard of [2017-05-31 19:33] but that's another discussion).
Instead, the "Friendly" format gives you useless approximations like "a few minutes ago", or "29 minutes ago", or "May 5".
This is what people are used to and what I suspect is the majority use case.
Why would we want to impose a non-standard format, "Friendly" or otherwise. The "Friendly" format is the unusual non-standard format and as such deserves to be the optional format.