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Are Platform Technologies A Scam?

By In Technology

Can someone actually explain to me what Sharepoint does?  If I worked in Microsoft’s sales department the best pitch I could give is:

“It’s the greatest, most versatile product that has ever existed. You can use it to run any complex system that your imagination could dream up.” This however would only be what I would pitch, not believe.

I’ve asked the question “ What does Sharepoint do?” to Microsoft sales staff, developers, and consultants. It always starts with something like: “Well… it’s, you know, like… a collaboration tool… BUT! It can do a ton of other stuff too”.

And that is the best answer I’ve gotten.

I’ve asked the same question of SAP vendors, Microsoft Dynamics consultants, and IBM Watson Cloud experts. The answer is always some amorphous, borderline ridiculous answer consisting of “well it does a lot of things” and “it greatly depends on the user”. This was not me asking rhetorical questions either. I was not trying to be glib, or overly clever, or even to pull some sort of #iamverysmart coup de grâce. I was trying to articulate what I do for a living by standing on the shoulders of “giants”.

You see, my company builds a “platform as a service” (roughly) type product as well. Something that could be more than one thing to more than one person. I struggle constantly with explaining that our product is better than anything else on the entire market. This is not a brag, nor a marketing ploy – but only because what we do is so niche that only 100 or so companies in the world might care. And that is not the game IBM, Microsoft, and SAP are playing. They are ultimately the owners of your software. Sure the configurations, the modifications, and the custom programming on top of these platforms is yours, but if they take the platform away, or stop supporting it, what do you really have left? It’s even tougher in “the cloud” business because then if your subscription runs out you’re dead.

I recently made a prediction to a friend who was starting a project with IBM. I warned them of the potential lock-in problem by making a prediction something along the lines of “They are going to tell you they can build it quicker and more effienctly with IBM Watson Cloud. No project ever runs perfectly, and when you finally step in to set things straight, you will find out you have zero leverage. They will simply say you are more than welcome to fire them, because they know you would have to build everything over from scratch”. My predictions were to no avail. No one ever gets fired for hiring IBM. And guess what happened? The only upside is that I get to say “I told you so” a little more often.

There is hope! There are other ways that platforms can be useful but also safe. One way is to use an open source platform, one that if at worst comes to worst, you can fire all your consultants and hire new ones, and the platform is still going to be around.

This is a little tougher with very niche enterprise products like ours, but we’ve done something a little different to combat my lock-in loathing: Our  products are OWNED by our clients. We sign a three year, non-exclusive agreement with our clients for support and maintenance,  and a traditional license fee is baked in. They get all the source code, and agree not to resell it. But if we don’t perform, or our clients want to go a different way, they get to keep the software and build on it themselves. We earn our right to be at the table by being the experts in a system we designed, working with their developers, adding new features, bringing our industry expertise to the conversation, and hundreds of other small bits of value. In this way we hope to be at the top of the renewals list in three years.

The idea of someone taking your software away from me is abhorrent. If your car company one day sent you an email saying that you now had to upgrade your fuel tank, and there was going to be a new subscription service if you wanted to keep using the same type of gasoline, you would riot in the streets. The model of software is not what is wrong here, what is wrong is the lock-in. Vendor lock-in is amoral. If there is no ability to keep something running, and there is no TRUE data portability option, then you are basically being extorted.

I get that as a business you are trying to maximize profit. I try to do the same thing. However I want to my product and my company to seen as sticky because we are valuable, and not because we would just be too painful to get rid of.

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I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of judo, squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

The Internet Doesn’t Have Enough Love In It (And How We Can Fix It Easily)

In Technology

I’ve been thinking about all the wrong things when it comes to AI writing code.

Everyone else seems to be too. Job displacement. Security vulnerabilities. The ten-times-faster developer who now bills the same and delivers four times as much. These are real conversations worth having, just not the one I want to have right now.

The one I want to have is about teaching a six-year-old multiplication.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine you’ve been sitting with your kid every night for two weeks trying to explain multiplication. You’ve tried drawing rows of dots. You’ve tried songs (don’t judge me). You’ve tried the “just think of it as groups of things” approach that works for literally every other math concept but, mysteriously, not for your kid. Then one night, something clicks. You found the explanation, YOUR explanation, the one that worked for your actual kid with your actual kid’s brain, and it finally, beautifully, clicks.

Now imagine you could spend a Saturday morning turning that into a small web app. Not a startup. Not a SaaS platform. No login. No backend. No one’s going to hack it (there’s nothing to hack). Just a little thing that walks through multiplication the exact way you figured out it works, step by step, the way you’d explain it. You send it to the WhatsApp group for your kid’s class. Some of those other parents, also quietly losing their minds over multiplication, try it. And it helps.

You just made the world a tiny bit better. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Claude Code exists now, and a handful of other tools like it, and the reason I think this matters isn’t productivity. It’s access. The barrier between “I have an idea for something that could help people” and “I have a thing that helps people” used to require knowing how to code, or hiring someone who does, or talking a developer friend into your project over enough beers that their guilt exceeded their better judgment. Now it’s a Saturday morning and a good description of what you want to build.

The internet already has beautiful things in it that were built out of love. Free coding education for kids. Open-source video editors. Someone’s incredibly detailed home-brewing app with no monetization plan whatsoever. Artists making interactive experiences because they wanted to see if they could. These things exist because someone cared more about making the thing than making money from the thing. I think that ratio is about to shift dramatically in favor of the people who just want to make something good.

I’m not saying we should all stop paying for Salesforce (we should probably keep paying for Salesforce, there’s a reason that thing costs what it costs). I’m saying the category of software that was previously not worth building because it wasn’t commercial enough to justify the cost, that category just got a lot more interesting.

What’s in that category? Things like:

  • An app that helps beginning judo students understand the concepts behind a throw, not just the mechanics, because judo is where I learned confidence and discipline and I want other kids to find that
  • A private family memory vault (not Instagram, not Facebook, not anything with an algorithm deciding what matters), just a place where the people who love my son can send photos and stories somewhere safe, for him to open when he’s older (Maybe I’ll turn this into something?)
  • A system that reminds companies to send their employees gifts on the days that actually matter to them, because I know from running a company that it fills the cup of the person giving just as much as the person receiving (Thankscrate, if you’re curious, and yes, that one is turning into something real, but that is genuinely not why I built it)

None of those were commercial ideas first. They were just things I cared about.

I think the most interesting software that gets built in the next few years won’t come from developers moving faster. It’ll come from people who previously had no path from “I care about this” to “I built something about this,” and now they do. Parents. Coaches. Teachers. The person in your office who could explain that one complicated process better than anyone and has always secretly wanted to turn it into something.

The stakes are low. The bar to launch is low. The cost is low. The only thing required is that you actually give a damn about what you’re building.

So… What do you give a damn about?

Go build it. I still sometimes have to count on my fingers, but I’m told the app helps.