Ya know, I love you guys but sheesh! If I could taste the ideas in this piece they'd all be cardboard. Really. I was around for and played a minor part in the turn-of-the-century screw when big iron melted into a pool of subscription services. That was fun. I rummaged my brain for a quote from Peter Drucker and came up with disruptive innovation and that gave theme and resonance to the era. Ask Greenberg, he documented it. But what do we have today? AI and its ilk are not so much disruptive innovations as they are Elon at the Department of Education. And all of the electronic coin in the world won't generate more value than a Ponzi scheme. Temporarily. Nothing is being built here but a pile of crap and all the layering of crap on crap won't make some innovation stack up out of nothing. The Europeans are gleefully walling us out. This is not the Age of AI. If anything it is the Age of Nada and we are all praying Hemingway's Prayer, "Our Nada who art in Nada, Nada be thy Nada..." I live a boring life these days painting, working out, and cooking with occasional PT but at least I keep my consciousness relatively free of President Nada and the Nada economy. Too bad, it was a hell of a ride and it's over all ready.
Notice one itsy bitsy company called Sigma Computing. Spreadsheet UI with Data apps atop Snowflake or Databricks Lakehouse. Already growing 100% per year. In there is a classic hall of marbles happening in front of the SaaS industry…
In industry, we have a long history of such rapid cycles of change and inertia is key to this. These cycles we call “revolutions” as in industrial, mechanical and the revolution of electricity. During these times, change is rapid not gradual and disruption is widespread.
The cold hard reality that many existing suppliers probably don’t comprehend is that the battle will be over in three to four years and for many the time to act has already passed. Like the rapid change in climate temperature in Greenland, our past experience of change does not necessarily represent the future.
Hence for a hardware manufacturer who has sold computer products and experienced gradual change for thirty years, it is understandable how they might consider this change to utility services will also happen slowly. They will have huge inertia to the change because of past success, they may view it as just an economic blip due to a recession and their customers will often try to reinforce the past asking for more “enterprise” like services. Worst of all, they will believe they have time to transition, to help customers gradually change, to spend the years building and planning new services and to migrate the organization over to the new models.
Isn’t CRM dying on the vine? Small data apps sitting on top of a Lakehouse that’s got all the data in it - not just the niche that is the customer piece. It sort of follows what Satya Nadella is musing about - CRUD tables with business logic sitting in LLMs above the chaos. And that chaos includes all the juicy data inside an Enterprise, not just the subset that sits on the open web.
There’s a classic “Hall of Marbles” happening right in front of all of us. As cited in one of Simon Wardleys pieces a few years back:
It’s the exponential growth part that catches most past suppliers out and that’s due to this expectation of gradual change due to the previous competitive stage (i.e. product vs product). To explain this, I’ll use an analogy from a good friend of mine, Tony Fish.
Consider a big hall that can contain a million marbles. If we start with one marble and double the number of marbles each second, then the entire hall will be filled in 20 seconds. At 19 seconds, the hall will be half full. At 15 seconds only 3% of the hall, a small corner will be full. Despite 15 seconds having passed, only a small corner of the hall is full and we could be forgiven for thinking we have plenty more time to go, certainly vastly more than the fifteen seconds it has taken to fill the small corner. We haven’t. We’ve got five seconds.
WRT: "Crappy" generative AI. Consider the toupée paradox. People say you can always spot a toupée. But can you? How would you know for sure? Yes, you can spot the bad ones. But what if there are good ones that you can't spot?
5 seconds sound about right
Ya know, I love you guys but sheesh! If I could taste the ideas in this piece they'd all be cardboard. Really. I was around for and played a minor part in the turn-of-the-century screw when big iron melted into a pool of subscription services. That was fun. I rummaged my brain for a quote from Peter Drucker and came up with disruptive innovation and that gave theme and resonance to the era. Ask Greenberg, he documented it. But what do we have today? AI and its ilk are not so much disruptive innovations as they are Elon at the Department of Education. And all of the electronic coin in the world won't generate more value than a Ponzi scheme. Temporarily. Nothing is being built here but a pile of crap and all the layering of crap on crap won't make some innovation stack up out of nothing. The Europeans are gleefully walling us out. This is not the Age of AI. If anything it is the Age of Nada and we are all praying Hemingway's Prayer, "Our Nada who art in Nada, Nada be thy Nada..." I live a boring life these days painting, working out, and cooking with occasional PT but at least I keep my consciousness relatively free of President Nada and the Nada economy. Too bad, it was a hell of a ride and it's over all ready.
Notice one itsy bitsy company called Sigma Computing. Spreadsheet UI with Data apps atop Snowflake or Databricks Lakehouse. Already growing 100% per year. In there is a classic hall of marbles happening in front of the SaaS industry…
In industry, we have a long history of such rapid cycles of change and inertia is key to this. These cycles we call “revolutions” as in industrial, mechanical and the revolution of electricity. During these times, change is rapid not gradual and disruption is widespread.
The cold hard reality that many existing suppliers probably don’t comprehend is that the battle will be over in three to four years and for many the time to act has already passed. Like the rapid change in climate temperature in Greenland, our past experience of change does not necessarily represent the future.
Hence for a hardware manufacturer who has sold computer products and experienced gradual change for thirty years, it is understandable how they might consider this change to utility services will also happen slowly. They will have huge inertia to the change because of past success, they may view it as just an economic blip due to a recession and their customers will often try to reinforce the past asking for more “enterprise” like services. Worst of all, they will believe they have time to transition, to help customers gradually change, to spend the years building and planning new services and to migrate the organization over to the new models.
Isn’t CRM dying on the vine? Small data apps sitting on top of a Lakehouse that’s got all the data in it - not just the niche that is the customer piece. It sort of follows what Satya Nadella is musing about - CRUD tables with business logic sitting in LLMs above the chaos. And that chaos includes all the juicy data inside an Enterprise, not just the subset that sits on the open web.
There’s a classic “Hall of Marbles” happening right in front of all of us. As cited in one of Simon Wardleys pieces a few years back:
It’s the exponential growth part that catches most past suppliers out and that’s due to this expectation of gradual change due to the previous competitive stage (i.e. product vs product). To explain this, I’ll use an analogy from a good friend of mine, Tony Fish.
Consider a big hall that can contain a million marbles. If we start with one marble and double the number of marbles each second, then the entire hall will be filled in 20 seconds. At 19 seconds, the hall will be half full. At 15 seconds only 3% of the hall, a small corner will be full. Despite 15 seconds having passed, only a small corner of the hall is full and we could be forgiven for thinking we have plenty more time to go, certainly vastly more than the fifteen seconds it has taken to fill the small corner. We haven’t. We’ve got five seconds.
WRT: "Crappy" generative AI. Consider the toupée paradox. People say you can always spot a toupée. But can you? How would you know for sure? Yes, you can spot the bad ones. But what if there are good ones that you can't spot?