> The problem isn’t that enterprise software doesn’t work - it is that you didn’t make it work for you. The only measure that counts, hidden behind all those la

> The problem isn’t that enterprise software doesn’t work - it is that you didn’t make it work for you. The only measure that counts, hidden behind all those layers of abstraction, is the final outcome - decision advantage. This is often viewed as an implementation detail (the second 80%), and implementation is often outsourced to experts (COVID should have also taught us all something about “experts“). The industry of consultants who themselves have never run businesses but tell cargo cult companies how to execute implementation further obfuscates the lack of productivity gains. This article is all over the place. It's written in a very confident and attention-grabbing style but lacks clarity and concreteness - especially so for an article criticizing abstraction! The quote above is the closest I could find to an interesting thesis. I would restate the argument as: 1. SaaS companies optimize for revenue 2. The buyers of SaaS are undiscerning and will buy convoluted SaaS products even if the software doesn't actually improve worker productivity 3. Therefore economic growth has slowed because so much talent goes into SaaS which builds products that no one needs. It's an interesting argument and I'm sure there's some truth to it. But surely the article would be better if it focused on supplying evidence for the incentive mismatch in #2 and showing that the magnitude is large enough to cause #3, rather than throwing out ambiguous and condescending claims about Covid, consultants, cargo cults. The core concept of "decision advantage" is not even defined, and seems to be borrowed from military terminology.