Use it or lose it - time to start thinking…again
An alfresco meeting with Sameer Patel got me thinking more about a topic I’ve had swirling around for what passes as my brain for almost two years.
2023 has started for me with an intellectual bang, facilitated by a few hours spent with Sameer Patel.
Sameer visits the U.K. with his family when there is an international squash competition held in the U.K. His son Zane is ranked #1 in USA under 17s and Sameer is rightfully proud of Zane’s achievements.
We have known each other for many years, I’d like to say 14-15, and while we’ve spoken on many occasions, we’ve only met a handful of times. We share a common passion for all things food although in the past we were often drawn together as people on different sides of the enterprise technology fence, with all the intellectual combat that suggests.
When we met this week, Sameer reminded me that our first deep engagements centred around the future of enterprise software. He said something profound that recalled our interaction and, more broadly, the kinds of conversation a bunch of us put into the public domain. Sameer’s meeting report puts it this way:
Dennis and I actually met a little over a decade ago over professional disagreements about how enterprise software would shape up over the next decade. The difference is that we (and a solid network of two dozen-ish enterprise software analysts, writers, and practitioners) were never seeking to be right but rather, were looking for the right answer. We freely shared and celebrated each other’s thinking and grew the proverbial pie as a result.
I went back to find the conversation to which he was referring. Sameer’s story, Why Process Barfs On Social, penned in 2009, provides a good example of how to respond when faced with a flakpanzer approach to what, at the time, was the new hotness. According to Sameer’s recalling, I revisited my thinking, acknowledging where he had fair points. Sadly, neither of us can find my second piece and I can’t remember what I said.
That’s perhaps less important than the fact that I’ve always been someone who operates by the twin axioms of loosely holding strong opinions while trying to suck less every day. I guess it helps that I’m blessed with a mind that finds stimulus in curiosity. It makes me think, even if that thinking is wonky or plain bonkers.
But what surprised me was the extent to which more than 230 (and counting) people in our mutual networks enjoyed Sameer’s vignette and his hope of continuing to connect with people he finds intellectually interesting. It’s an admirable goal but one which, for me, is tinged with a sense of sadness.
In my back channel chats with some of those who interacted with Sameer’s post, I quickly confirmed something that’s been a growing concern of mine for several years.
While I have no doubt there is a fresh generation of inquiring minds, I see very little evidence of their existence. One correspondent said that he has to teach new hires how to ask the right types of question. Another told me that what passes as critique these days is little more than pablum. I’ve pretty much stopped reading anything around technology, not because I no longer care, but because I see so little of debated value or genuine progress. For confirmation, check what I said in 2009 and parse against today’s pressing issues:
There are far bigger problems to solve like correctly managing the workforce in times of economic crisis, smoothing out lumpy supply chains, beating down on data center costs or just getting ERP to deliver the benefits that were intended and which have consumed billions of IT spend dollars.
I sense that part of this perceived reluctance to challenge centres around the fear of being singled out for outrage in the Rage Machine aka Twitter and, increasingly LinkedIn. Another part of me senses that in the focus on exam achievement, our younger generation is losing out on being taught the importance of asking fundamental questions. Or knowing where to look. Imagine for example my surprise to learn that my 3rd year computer science undergraduate grandson idolises Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos but has never been taught who Larry Ellison, Hasso Plattner, Marc Benioff or Aneel Bhusri are, their important contributions to enterprise technology and their playgrounds as the places that spawned (and continue to spawn) many thousand bright, new technologies and firms moving the ball forward.
Sameer and my conversation was overlaid with a sense of understandable nostalgia, reflected in some of the comments to Sameer’s meeting report. While nostalgia provides a nice fuzzy feeling and a sense of superiority when compared to what we might see today, it doesn’t help move things forward - grow the pie as Sameer says. And in truth, all those of the generation when we ‘grew up’ have moved on. That’s a good thing.
My view is that Sameer, myself and the self appointed high priest group of noughties thinkers were fortunate to share a loose common purpose at a time when the available tools - principally blogs and Twitter - were sufficiently polite and forgiving to keep the doors of inquiry open. They allowed us to discover, create and nurture long term relationships that transcend time and space. As example, when Sameer and I met this week, it was as though time collapsed, even though it must be at least four years since we last met in person.
Today, I see Substack as the space that could fulfil that same need for provoking debate and why I write here rather than revisit older platforms.
I’d like to see tools like Substack work as encouragers for those curious about what comes next, those trying to figure the answers to difficult problems or those who simply want to ask the eternal question: Why?
Blame the SQL era. Brin & Page at Stanford learned from the human genome project to Map first, sequence later (map reduce). This makes a world of difference for dealing with very large data in huge connected enterprises, finding results in search, dealing with consistent financials, and processes for profitability. Bezos and Musk followed in the post SQL era steps. While the ERP vendors, tapped out on SQL and have turned to vertical industry solutions on rigid SaaS and cloud marketing, in a folly for growth. SAP HANA excepted, made SQL cubular, and uses Apple's LLVM open source to optimize in real-time. The rest of ERP vendors are flogging a dead horse and bound for the PE knackers yard. Spurred on by a pabulum of industry analysts festing on rubber chicken dinners and T&E jollys.