Familiarity is the enemy: On why Enterprise systems have failed for 60 years
by adityaathalye on 4/24/2026, 4:48:54 AM
https://felixbarbalet.com/familiarity-is-the-enemy/
Comments
by: somat
"When the software is being written by agents as much as by humans, the familiar-language argument is the weakest it has ever been - an LLM does not care whether your codebase is Java or Clojure. It cares about the token efficiency of the code, the structural regularity of the data, the stability of the language's semantics across releases."<p>Isn't familiarity with the language even more the case with a LLM. The language they do best with is the one with the largest corpus in the training set.
4/24/2026, 6:44:12 AM
by: adityaathalye
Yeah, "Nobody every got fired for purchasing IBM"... a story as old as time itself.<p>But that is the "fear" side of the enterprise sales equation... The "greed" side of it is for the buyer to make the long / short hedge.<p>The exec who gets the value of the working product can potentially come out shining, when their peers will be furiously backpedalling next year. And this consummate exec can do it by name-associating with their "main bet" which is optically great for the immediate term but totally out of their control (because big corp vendor will drag its feet like every SAP integration failure they've seen), and feeling a sense of agency by running an off-books skunkworks project that actually works and saves the day.<p>A fine needle to thread for the upstart, but better than standing outside the game.
4/24/2026, 7:57:01 AM
by: egorfine
> The category has never once, in sixty years, produced a product that reliably made good<p>In the same article the author was mentioning a few expert systems from the past that were quite obviously successful.<p>> on the promise printed on its marketing<p>Ah, _that_ promise. That promise is never fulfilled anywhere nor it is expected to.
4/24/2026, 8:16:05 AM
by: JSR_FDED
The core insight that enterprises select products on familiarity over anything else, is valuable. I’m going to keep it in mind for future customer engagements.
4/24/2026, 5:58:33 AM
by: xivzgrev
That's just human nature, to prefer what's familiar.<p>The insight here is that this also still applies to huge enterprise contracts where supposedly more rational decision making should apply.
4/24/2026, 7:30:04 AM
by: egorfine
> The category error under all of this is the assumption that you can take a document library or a wiki [...] and make it intelligent by attaching a language model to it. But you cannot.<p>Imagine a model with a reliable 100M context window. Then all of a sudden you can.<p>> The information the intelligent answer needs was never in the wiki in the first place.<p>Oh well.
4/24/2026, 8:12:20 AM
by: egorfine
> your system is not an intelligence tool, it is a compression primitive with a chat interface on top<p>One should not underestimate a "compression primitive with a chat interface". For certain tasks it is a superpower.
4/24/2026, 8:21:45 AM
by: avereveard
Eh, it's skipped in "the enemy" section an important bit, that was spelled out in the intro by the buyer, and wasn't listened: if the small vendor goes bust, who maintains the system after? if you plan for in 10 year cycles, greenfield buys look scary<p>That why vc look favorably to startup which go trough the motion of setting up partner led sales channel. an established partner taking maintenance contracts bridge the disconnect in the lifecycle gap between the two realities.<p>But no, corporate is bad, I guess.
4/24/2026, 7:18:40 AM
by: BrenBarn
> And they put it succinctly: buying from a small innovative company is brave while buying from a big, well recognised name is an insurance policy and the risk-averse buyer must have the insurance.<p>As the article notes, the alternatives from the large companies suck. So this is like buying fire insurance from a company that promptly sets fire to your house. You are buying the insurance while knowing you will need it because the disaster is already happening.
4/24/2026, 6:12:44 AM
by: sublinear
> Enterprise knowledge has always been as much a human problem as a technology one. Nobody wants to do the structuring work, and every prior architecture demanded that somebody do the structuring work rather than their actual job<p>This is correct and very agreeable to everyone, but then after some waffle they then write this:<p>> Structure, for the first time, can be produced from content instead of demanded from people<p>These quotes are very much at odds. Where is this structure and content supposed to come from if you just said that nobody makes it? Nowhere in that waffle is it explained <i>clearly</i> how this is really supposed to work. If you want to sell AI and not just grift, this is the part people are hung up on. Elsewhere in the article are stats on hallucination rates of the bigger offerings, and yet there's nothing to convince anyone this will do better other than a pinky promise.
4/24/2026, 6:57:02 AM
by: Till_Opel
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4/24/2026, 7:42:07 AM
by: DocTomoe
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4/24/2026, 6:44:55 AM