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.
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.
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.
That was a deliberate offer from Big Tech: put aside your old convival systems and let us handle the details. Google deliberately deskilled web search, other companies broke systems administration and software packages that users can understand and edit. The point is that once you don’t understand the details and cannot operate on your own, the big company can do what it likes and you have to take it. Organizations who switch to AWS rarely find that it saved them money but hiring a new team of IT people to build an alternative would be a hassle.
I think there’s some truth to that, but it also bears acknowledging that the market demand existed already. The number of people who can get a lot of benefit from IT productivity tools is much higher than the number of people who are willing to do the work of maintaining and customizing their own stuff. From an organizational perspective, it often ends up making more sense to directly contract with a known and trusted third party instead of developing the native capabilities, and at that point the tools and skills themselves start to specialize in ways to provide IT as a service at scale. Economies of scale lend themselves to efficiency but at the cost of resiliency and concentrating power, and tech companies chasing the line ever upwards have been abusing the absolute hell out of that, but while they have been altering the deal (pray they do not alter it any further) their bullshit is not the only reason why the deal exists in the first place.