In Adrift in the Sea of Nonsense, I said the following:

The software industry is full of middle aged men, talking to other middle aged men, using jargon that none of them understand, and all of them are hoping nobody will notice.

I went on at length to describe how this plays out socially within organizations. What I am starting to get an insight into is how this happens between organizations, and how people deal with it.

There are limits to how many new things people can visualize and process at one time, especially when those things are nebulous concepts like software running in the cloud. Engineers who work on these solutions usually understand every single piece very clearly, because they fall down the stairs on every single sharp edge of every piece of the solution every day. But, other people within organizations don’t have that kind of visibility; they know that the dork works on ThingX, that this customer bought ThingX before they started working here, and ThingX is supposed to do A,B,C. If someone wants D,E,F, they need to use ThingY instead.

What happens when you’re trying to sell software to someone who wants A,C,E, and F? Well, if your model of the world is ThingX and ThingY, the natural thing to suggest is that they should get ThingX and ThingY together, to get the superset of those individual pieces.

“Why the fuck do I want that shit? I don’t want to manage ThingX and ThingY and run fishing line between your tin cans to make it work. I want something that does A,C,E,F.”

A naive solution to this problem is to create ThingZ, which only does A,C,E,F. That’s a waste of money, because now you have to maintain ThingX, ThingY, and ThingZ.

A less naive solution is to say you’ll give the customer the ThingPlatform, which does A,C,E,F. When in reality, ThingPlatform is just ThingX + ThingY; all of that stuff with tin cans is still going to happen, but you’re not making it the customer decision maker’s problem. So that way, he can visualize the ThingPlatform as being a perfect rectangle that fits on his solution diagram in whatever shape and size it needs to be. Because he can understand the rest of the world more easily if he deliberately tries not to understand the ThingPlatform.

Now I just need everyone to understand that we’re not doing ThingZ anymore, because it was dumb and made no money.