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I'm not disagreeing but I was reminded of a counterexample: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/birmingham_oracle_latest/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01

• adammarples 6mo ago
  > Although the council had planned to implement Oracle "out-of-the-box," it created several customizations including a banking reconciliation system that failed to function properly. The council struggled to understand its cash position and was unable to produce auditable accounts. It has spent more than £5 million on manual workaround labor. Not a great example of a single centralised system. The errors came from trying to write custom reconciliation code between two systems, the ERP and the bank - perfect example of the problems OP raises.
  • lmc 6mo ago
    Fair point but AWS is also highly extensible, and i'm not sure about Palantir but i guess it must be too to a point? Maybe it's a classic case of good abstractions vs bad ones
• sigbottle 6mo ago
  No I mean like, centralization is unfortunately the thing that just works. I work at a company that thinks extremely deeply about interoperability issues and everybody is on the opposite side: it can be said that we were made as a response to xkcd 927, to try and solve the issue. I think the company is right in that semantic decentralization with interoperability would be a good end goal, but I think just plain darwinism explains the necessity of the opposite.