Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Manual

On why building software is about to be the easy part, why it was arguably always the easy part, and what companies will actually sell once everyone admits it They are climbing in your knowledge base. They are reading your API reference. They have opinions about the contradiction between chapter seven and appendix C. Hide your kids, hide your manual - although, fair warning, for the manual it is already too late. An uncomfortable inventoryLet us begin with an audit nobody requested. Take a typical small or mid-sized business - two hundred people, a respectable product, a CFO who sighs in spreadsheets. Its entire digital estate - the CRM, the ERP, the ticketing system, the wiki, the invoicing, the scheduling tool, the dashboard nobody opens, and the eleven subscriptions whose purpose has been lost to history but whose invoices arrive with liturgical punctuality - all of it runs comfortably on a few virtual machines hosting a couple dozen Docker containers. The complete digital nervous…