Creative Destruction

 I had lunch with a good friend and colleague Wednesday (December 2025), who is deeply experienced in artificial intelligence.  We talked about how AI is being used, how it is being deployed and when and where companies can expect to see value from AI. I told him (with full acknowledgement, I am an observer of AI, not an expert) that the current wave reminded me a lot of when SAP was entering the US market and ERP was taking over from disparate financial systems or manufacturing systems.  At that time and soon afterward, we developed a mantra: paving the goat path.  What many companies wanted to do with SAP, a modern, fully integrated application, was to configure it to work the way they had always worked - no rethinking of process flows or decision making, just faster and more integrated ways of doing what they were already doing. Needless to say, configuring the software to mimic their existing business processes was a mistake.  What this did was lock in older...

 I've been scanning the posts on LinkedIn lately, and they are beginning to feel a bit spooky to me.  All of them are following the same formula.  First, they name a big problem that some reader needs to solve, then the post claims to have a secret that will address the issue.  Then, of course, you need to click into the post to learn more, only to find more text building awareness and tension about what the secret is.  I remember fondly the Motley Fool, a site I followed for years, does this type of writing better than anyone. The Motley Fool will describe an investment that is simply too good to miss, and then go on for several pages about the characteristics, the potential and so on, only to reserve the name of the stock for the last page or link, where you also discover you'll need to subscribe or pay for the information.  After reading all the previous material, there is sort of a sunk cost fallacy about not going ahead and getting the rest of the info...

 I'm being a bit general today, not my usually specific self.  The title of this post suggests that I am going to talk about subscriptions as a way to acquire products or services, but actually, the idea is broader than that.  Subscriptions allow individuals to acquire goods or services on a month basis that they may, or may not, be able to afford otherwise.  Obviously, we have other mechanisms for this same behavior - the loan.  For example, the vast majority of us use loans to purchase big ticket items like cars or homes.  We make a small downpayment and borrow the rest to pay over time. Increasingly, the idea of paying over time (buy now, pay later) is being used for other goods and services.  DoorDash is partnering with Klarna, so that you can have your dinner delivered and pay for it months later.  In a more interesting case, there's the story I read on LinkedIn about people buying their pets on an installment plan.  Yes, buying your pup...

 News that Microsoft is slashing sales expectations for its CoPilot application seem to suggest that all isn't quite what it's cracked up to be in the world of AI, or should we perhaps more correctly say, the subset of AI that is LLMs.  ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, CoPilot and others have taken the world by storm, leading to stories that border on science fiction, where machines do all the work.  Of course, when folks like Elon Musk argue that robots will do all of our work, it's not hard to get caught up in the wave of advocacy that's going on right now. What we need to realize is that almost every technology is overhyped initially, often fails to deliver on its first and second broad deployments, and eventually finds its product market fit.  Beyond these truths, we have the added disadvantage of having the largest figures in the AI market - OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and others, along with their infrastructure supporters such as Nvidia, making bold claims about the fut...

 I've just finished reading a book that illustrates the interesting parallels of two major figures in the 20th century, Winston Churchill and George Orwell.  The period of time they were alive and the kinds of change they experienced seems quite amazing now.  There are interesting similarities between the two - both were outsiders in their respective classes and friend groups.  Both were natural contrarians.  Both rose to big occasions but were not respected and often did not live up to their billing in normal, everyday life.  The book is called Churchill & Orwell, The fight for freedom , by Thomas Ricks.  After reading it, I'd highly recommend it.  While topically about history, the author does a good job pointing out what both Churchill and Orwell had to say about our situation today. I stumbled across the book at my local library.  I did not need any encouragement to pick it up.  Churchill by himself is a great, and flawed charact...