Fancy Buggy Homebrew?
My recent post remembering the gorilla of an objection growing from the first use of an Enterprise system to run a business still swills around my mind.
Where I mentioned in passing, vibecoding.
I now discover those Private Equity masters of the universe love a bit of that.
The FT reports how Bain actively use it. As part of their due diligence. Letting their team loose on seeing if they can vibecode the software they're thinking of buying.
Apparently it elevates their thinking 'from 2-D to 3-D'.
I actually quite like that.
Given one insight emerging uncovers the extent to which they're dealing with a business based on code alone or something else.
That something else preferably being in their jargon, "defensible". We all need a bit of that unique about what we provide.
Earlier in the year, reading this FT piece sign-off stuck with me. From Louise Lucas;
"The odds are that companies, for now, will prefer to buy [apps] from the pros, rather than spend weeks eliminating bugs from home-cooked alternatives."
In the late-90s when selling what now we'd look back on and call an add-on BI module, every month saw at least one hot deal added to the forecast where someone at the prospect leaned towards writing what we offered themselves.
Those was their days.
That someone always the top bean counter. Crazily then, lording it over the whole IT efforts.
Spoiler alert: it never ended well for them.
The desire to, as we termed it back then, go homebrew, slipped off the options as the Noughties progressed.
In part, because the industry slowly woke up to the joys of subscription selling. At a stroke removing the painful CapEx shackles. Also because so many of the next gen of the new comptrollers had seen first-hand the disaster of their employer trying to in effect become a software house themselves. When having precisely the square root of zero in both experience of such and chance of success.
The journalist cited above is right on the money.
Anyone who has actually vibecoded will tell you that having your single sexy homescreen is miles away from a robust, refinable, scalable app that would happily work in the field on contact with actual users.
If you sell 'software', or anything that can now be supposedly ripe for vibecoding for the Enterprise, it seems this seventy-year old objection is coming full circle. Come-back One;
'Yeah, you can do it yourself. Any prospect can ...'
As from its beginnings, one exception proves the rule.
Are they experts in what people pay them for today, or in pursuing what is effectively a technical, programming start-up? You could ask,
"Are you in your present business, or in the business of becoming a software house?"