I've always thought of the practice of salespeople selling software that "does everything" and "makes everything visible to management" as selling the metaprogr

I've always thought of the practice of salespeople selling software that "does everything" and "makes everything visible to management" as selling the metaprogram. The metaprogram is an all in one piece of software (or hardware) that replaces all of IT with a system that is easily understood and controlled by management, is relatively inexpensive, easily expandable to new purposes, and solves whatever problems the target company seems to be having at the time. I've seen IT department middle managers and CIOs try to do this over and over again. When a good solution to a problem is presented that's practical, affordable, and effective, their very next thought is "but what if it also did XXXX". I guess that's how they "add value" or something, by suggesting ideas that have already been discarded for reasons of scope, funding, or time. So far in my career I've seen salespeople use the idea of solving any pain points for the target company including reducing costs and increasing reliability by selling: * Desktop Microcomputers * Peer to peer networking * Dedicated internet lines (when they were still phone company lines) * Minicomputers (transition from Mainframes) * Java machines everywhere * Clustering software and hardware * Physical and virtual partitioning of systems * Thin Clients * Cloud everything * Containerized data centers ...and there are many more. I find it's mostly sales people and middle managers that benefit from the hype cycle. As with any new technology in any industry, things become part of the tool box. The main reason a lot of modernization projects get launched is the same reason that business re-orgs happen - they're a way for managers with no other ideas to show they're contributing.