Short dispatches on software, data, and the people caught in between — why humans became the plug in the pipe, and what happens now that the pipe can finally flow.
Software was built with humans as operators — never as decision-makers. For forty years you were the wiring between systems that couldn't talk. That era ends.
Watch · :60 · sound on →The VLOOKUP wizards. The pivot-table poets. The first engineers of the data age — who saw the pipe before anyone, and got handed a bucket.
Watch · :60 · sound on →Your data taught the vendor's software everything it knows. Lock-in just reached new heights — and the migration to bring that intelligence home is coming.
Watch · :60 · sound on →The veteran counting down to retirement. The new hire in shock. The role nobody can fill. It was never a training problem, never a talent problem — the system demands a superhuman.
Watch · :60 · sound on →They bolted AI onto an app built for other users in other departments. You tried it. You didn't buy it. So it showed up on your renewal — because they think you're trapped.
Watch · :60 · sound on →The old playbook: send the senior directors to conferences, sign a Barney deal, and nothing happens. Ever. Now the habit says "buy a product — I need a demo." A demo of what? Of tomorrow?
Watch · :60 · sound on →Management said "Cut costs. AI." — and left the details to you. The giants buy shelter, the consultants re-price the binder, and nobody has a strategy. A practical company builds one pipe.
Watch · :60 · sound on →Custom code was the thing everyone knew to fear — ding dong, that's over. The parking-lot ideas are alive again. The tech got easy. The courage didn't. So: where is the courage?
Watch · :60 · sound on →For seventy years software was an expense — it aged, it depreciated, it got replaced. Software that learns your business every day is the first software that appreciates. So: where does the learning accrue?
Watch · :60 · sound on →"The internet is a fad." "Nobody needs a website." "I gotta trust my guys." Deep down, you already know — you say it out of habit. Trust isn't a strategy. Keep the guys. Change the question.
Watch · :60 · sound on →A terrifying thought experiment: the task force, the offsite, the 3 a.m. googling — and at the end of all that agonizing… you're just awesome? No apocalypse. Tuesday, but better.
Watch · :60 · sound on →Fifty years of software history, no quiz: mainframe, client-server, the shrink-wrapped box, SaaS. Every era changed the delivery and kept the heaps. Nobody was stupid — every era was rational, until it wasn't. Class dismissed.
Watch · :60 · sound on →Your business teaches AI something every day — how you quote, how you win, what made you lose. One question: whose AI? You're unpaid faculty. And you pay the tuition.
Watch · :60 · sound on →We predicted the platforms would become expensive data warehouses. Last week, one started selling the inventory — your records, shared by default. Four days of fury, full reversal. They won't be the last.
Watch · :60 · sound on →A field note from the near future, drawn instead of argued: three copies of the same customer, one canonical stream — and outsourcing that hands a vendor a metered stream, not your logins. Own the stream. Rent the operators.
Watch · :60 · sound on →A pricing teardown, legal edition: the DMS rents you documents, the enterprise AI rents you seats — either way you pay for the menu and own nothing. Then the custom column, priced in the open. Run the math.
Watch · :60 · sound on →Somewhere a room is testing the breeze to set your renewal uplift — no list price, no cost basis, just a bet on how stuck you are. Don't sign stuck: one conversation, one slice, a plan that can take a year.
Watch · :60 · sound on →You just signed the renewal. Maybe you hate yourself a little. Smile anyway — with a twelve-month plan, the year you just bought becomes the runway off Salesforce, no broken Mondays, and month twelve is a no.
Watch · :60 · sound on →Your clients expect the firm to run on AI, so you're comparing products. But the learning accumulates inside the software — and rented software isn't yours. Own the application; own the learning. The first :15 note.
Watch · :15 · sound on →The mere-mortals anatomy of AI: the model is rented, the files are boxes, and the intelligence is the map in the middle — built from your documents, at your expense, in a database. One question: whose? Check the address.
Watch · :60 · sound on →The ERP runs the plant — so why does everything important live in spreadsheets? Your processes work that way for a reason; the software never caught up. Keep your ERP. Replace the spreadsheets.
Watch · :15 · sound on →