Hello premium subscribers! Today I have the first guest post I've ever commissioned (read: paid) on Where's Your Ed At - Nik Suresh, one of the greatest living business and tech writers, best-known for his piece I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again, probably my

edit 2 this is the article I meant to share from Nik Suresh who Ed featured https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

edit sorry I meant to link unpaywalled article, there is another similar current one from Ed

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-more-you-buy-the-more-you-lose/

Ed asked me to write about why leaders around the world are constantly buying software they don’t need. He probably had a few high-profile companies in mind, like Snowflake. Put aside whether Snowflake is a good product – most people don’t know what a database is, so why on earth does a specialized and very expensive database have a market cap of $71B?

That’s a fair question – and being both a software engineer and the managing director at a tech consultancy, I can talk about what’s happening on the ground. And yes, people are buying software that they don’t need.

I wish that was the extent of our problems.

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    Zero Interest Rates Policy from 2008-2022 and lack of antitrust enforcement in the USA lead to two things: incumbent software companies got bigger because they could borrow so much money and buy or crush their competition, and small software companies did not have to make profits now because investors tossed in more money and hoped they would make big profits one day. That world is dead but the industry has not adapted.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      19 hours ago

      I think corporate consolidation is a huge part of it, but I think a lot of software and tech falls into the same trap that a lot of infrastructure projects do: even if everyone uses it, nobody wants to think about it. That general apathy (until it fails catastrophically in a bridge collapse or a major service outage) limits the avenues for feedback on whether software is actually good or not in the same way that people don’t have a lot of feedback on whether a water main is being routed in a reasonable way. It also creates room for grifters who specialize in obfuscating exactly what you’re paying for.