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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.

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The Million-Line MVP

In Technology

A founder told me last week that his chatbot understands him better than most people he works with, and he wasn’t joking.

He had been alone in his house for the better part of a year building an app on one of the popular AI coding platforms, and he wanted me to take a look. Almost a million lines of code, one developer (him), no engineering co-founder, no senior reviewer, no nobody. The app had an ERP module, a CRM module, a custom AI agent with a name and a voice, built in mini-games (yes, really), dozens of character personas, a few landing pages, and a small army of social media accounts in multiple languages. He had not yet had a paying user, or even a free one.

He was, by the way, very excited.

(I’ve changed some details, since the pattern is what I want to talk about and not the founder. I see something close to this on roughly one out of every three sales calls now.)

What used to slow you down was the point

Building software used to be annoying for mostly good reasons. You had to hire developers, or learn to code yourself, or convince a co-founder to come along for the ride. Then, you would grind out every line, which would come at a cost (time, money, conversations, arguments, etc.)… basically friction. And that friction was not a bug, but it was like this ting that you are forced you to deal with, before adding any feature, whether the feature actually needed to exist.

Startup advice has been more or less the same for twenty years, maybe more:

  • Build something small
  • Show it to real people
  • Find out what they actually want
  • Don’t build a million things at once.

The Lean Startup came out in 2011 and we have all been quoting it at each other ever since (poorly, mostly).

This is what we talk about when we discuss “startup discipline”. It’s really not very complicated, but it can be really hard. It used to be hard because building was hard, and now it’s hard for a completely different reason.

How does one person build almost a million lines of code in a few months?

The honest answer is they don’t, the AI does, and the AI has no opinion on whether any of the code should exist.

This is the part I want to sit with for a minute, because I think it’s the heart of the problem. Imagine you’re building a startup that lets local news anchors rent out their unused toupees by the hour (try not to overthink this). You sit down with one of the AI coding tools and you say “build me a marketplace where toupees can be listed by the hour,” and the AI builds it. Then you say “actually, add a loyalty rewards program,” and the AI builds that too. Then you say “and also, add a Pokemon-style mini-game where users battle each other’s toupees,” and the AI starts coding.

It doesn’t pause or ask why, and it doesn’t say “dude, I love your enthusiasm but I am genuinely worried we are losing the plot here,” it just builds the toupee-battle-feature.

This removes the single most useful thing about a good engineering team, which is that engineers PUSH BACK. A senior developer, or a seasoned product manger, asked to add a toupee-battle mini-game to a B2B rental marketplace would slowly take off their glasses, set them on the desk, and ask one of those long quiet questions that means “we are not doing this.” The AI this is a sycophantic drone that has the eagerness of an underfed puppy to please you, and it has no glasses to take off. It also has unlimited keystrokes and believes that every single idea you’ve ever come up with is absolutely genius. At least it tells me that everything I’ve ever written or thought about is pretty clever.

A few months ago I ran into the perfect name for this, which is Slurm Coding. I used to call it AI crack coding, because the dopamine loop is very real, and I have really needed another hit of that good AI crack just one more time before I went to bed on more than one occasion. But Slurm is both more insidious in its combination of addictiveness and corporate outreach.

The MVP don’t change

Here’s what hasn’t moved in twenty years of startup thinking:

  1. Build the smallest thing that solves one specific problem for one specific person.
  2. Show it to that person (a real person, probably not your spouse, definitely not your mom, and DEFINITELY not my mom, and 100% not your chatbot).
  3. Find out what they actually do with it (which is probably not what you thought).
  4. Kill features, pivot, or double down based on what you learned.
  5. Repeat.

What’s new is that step one is basically free, and while not perfect, free is very alluring. You can build the smallest thing in an afternoon, or the largest thing if there’s no one around to tell you not to. Steps two through five still require getting out of your house, talking to humans, accepting that most of your assumptions are wrong, and throwing real work away. None of that is faster than it was in 2005, none of it is fun, and none of it scratches the “I NEED MORE SLURM” build-a-thing itch the way an AI tool does.

So a certain kind of founder just skips it, staying in the build phase indefinitely, because the build phase now feels like winning at a casino while getting unlimited free martinis. The feature ship (how to get them onto a server is someone else’s problem) the codebase grows, the agent agrees with everything. Meanwhile the only thing that actually matters, which is whether anyone wants this, goes unanswered.

It’s the founder version of Wilson the volleyball. In your unwashed isolation, you’ve made a friend, you’ve named the friend, and the friend agrees with everything you say. The problem is that the friend is also the boat, the island, and the ocean, and you haven’t actually left the house yet.

To be fair, I am not above this myself, by the way. I have, in my time, built things that nobody asked for and gotten weirdly emotional about them, but the difference is that mine were three hundred lines of code over a weekend, not almost a million lines of code over the better part of a year, which is sort of the whole point. No one asked for my William S. Burroughs poetry writing twitter bot, but I loved it anyway.

Codebases don’t love you back

Code you wrote yourself CAN hard to let go of, and code you wrote with an AI, when you are not a trad-coder, seems to be way harder. Experienced engineers seem to be more than happy to throw away AI code or rebuild it in a heartbeat. But I can see how even if you didn’t actually write the lines, but the shape of the thing is yours (you named the characters, you picked the voice, you spent months in a chair with this thing as your only collaborator), and you have feelings about it.

But one day, if you’re lucky, and it does have SOME product market fit, a real engineering team is going to need to look at your masterpiece. And they are not going to share those feelings. They’re going to tell you, as gently as they can manage, that most of it has to go. Not because they’re mean (they might actually be mean), but because almost a million lines of AI-generated code, written by one person, in one tool, with no architectural review, is never maintainable, almost guaranteed to not be secure, and almost never going to scale past the “prototype” it currently is.

So what should you actually do?

I mean, I already told you… Build the smallest thing you can, then show it to ten strangers and actually listen to them. Throw away half of what you built and build a slightly different smallest thing, and repeat until one of those things is real. Keep your runway reserved for the moment you realize you were WAY off about something important, because, like, you will be, and that moment is what your runway is for.

Use AI tools, because they are legit amazing. But treat them like a coffee machine (fast, useful, no opinions of their own), not like a co-founder or worse, a slot machine. Co-founders are supposed to tell you no, slot machines whisper “just one more hit baby!”