vermorel Sep 09, 2022 | flag
When I look at the market, I see major contributions of GroupThink:
- Failure of IT Standardization. SAP and IBM failed the market. The recent gains in market share of Kinaxis, o9, and OMP are largely due to the failure of SAP to drive thought leadership in planning.
- Private Equity M&A. Software mergers & acquisitions also slowed innovation. The technology roll-ups of INFOR, JDA (now BlueYonder), and E2open improved investors’ balance sheets, but did not drive value for their clients.
- Event Companies Are the Nemesis of the Industry. Event companies take large sums of money from technology companies and host events based on the Rolodex of a prior supply chain leader

A spot-on analysis. Low level IT standardization is moving forward nicely (think federated identity management), but it's not the case for high level IT (think workflows). The success of products like Tableau reflects that there is a major need to cope with the lack of standardization.

M&A in enterprise software is almost always resulting in large about of technological debt. It's very hard to get good software engineers motivated about clean-up millions of lines of code of haphazard codebases where stuff has just been "thrown together".

Event Companies are a severe form of epistemic corruption. I discussed the case in https://tv.lokad.com/journal/2021/3/31/adversarial-market-research-for-enterprise-software/