Do you think that Google Apps is outsourcing? Your company's CRM? The Office licenses that (at least) your finance team depends on? The payments company allowing companies to accept transactions online?
"SaaS as outsourcing" is just obviously wrong, as well as "SaaS is rent-seeking" (which seems to entirely misunderstand what "rent-seeking" means).
Hah, you apparently don't understand what outsourcing is.
It's a simple question of make/buy. All your examples are can be either made in house, or outsourced to someone else to make for you.
For example, do we make our own ERP system in house? Or do we use a vendor's (SAP)? Do we pay another company for doing financial transactions, or do we setup our own infrastructure?
Companies that use SaaS products are outsourcing a function... Another example: Do we host our own data center, or do outsource and use a cloud SaaS like AWS?
"SaaS as outsourcing" is just obviously wrong, as well as "SaaS is rent-seeking" (which seems to entirely misunderstand what "rent-seeking" means).