The new economics of enterprise technology in an AI world - This is a strange collage of IT project success and failure. I think it’s saying that if your IT projects don’t show legible business improvement. They’re considered a failure. // Also, you have to look at an IT project as a big system, not just one point in time like the developers shipping an app. // “This pattern is clear in AI initiatives, where only 1 percent of company executives describe their gen AI rollouts as “mature”10 and only 10 to 20 percent of isolated AI experiments in the past two years scaled to create value. Our analysis of the impact of FinOps programs reveals that this misalignment of incentives leads to poor spend decisions on enterprise technology and results in a 20 to 30 percent loss of value.” // And commentary on IT projects in general, namely, it’s hard to get perceived ROI on them and stick to original (incorrect) ongoing budget estimates. On the other hand, would the company survive without them? Analogously, what is the ROI on electricity? // Also: “Some 10 to 20 percent of productivity resulting from work-from-home investments benefits employees rather than the enterprise (such as improved working conditions and freed-up time for personal activities).” Employees are better off, but who cares if it doesn’t make the shareholder more money?

Relative to your interests

• When was peak message in a bottle? - Only 80s kids will get this: “grandfather clocks; suits of armour; quicksand; spontaneous human combustion.” Also: big foot and UFOs.

• Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor? - Checks out on both sides.

• Pricing: A List of Tactics - Some mind-tricks to play with pricing.

• The coyote trap. - “Call it whatever you will, I don’t care, but we’re on a new path and companies are doing more than ever to extract every ounce of value out of everyone in the payroll system. I talked to a long time friend and former colleague who went from team leader to division leader overnight. No title change. No additional compensation. Just do more.”

• For many, patience is the killer LLM feature

• Anthropic closes $2.5 billion credit facility - “Annualized revenue reached $2 billion in the first quarter, the company confirmed, more than doubling from a $1 billion rate in the prior period. Revenue chief Kate Jensen said in a recent interview with CNBC that the number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually with Anthropic jumped eightfold from a year ago.”

• Platform Engineering: Evolution or Rebranding? - Get yourself a PaaS. // “the idea of a dedicated team removing frictions by building tools and resuable abstractions is an idea that’s here to stay.”

Read by the Robot

These are articles I asked the AI to summarize, and here’s its summary for you.

Middle-aged adults who drank 500ml of water before meals lost more weight, felt less hungry, and aged more slowly—suggesting that longevity may hinge less on willpower than on plumbing. Kyla Scanlon argued that friction—not efficiency—is the most valuable commodity, a bold claim in a world where even chewing gum now comes via subscription. Adam Mastroianni proposed rebuilding psychology around the structure of a board game, implying the current paradigm mostly resembles Candy Land with grad students.

Meanwhile, over in tomatoes, an 80,000-year journey from wild Andean fruit to CRISPR-modified supermarket staple suggests some things, at least, do improve with breeding. And at Target, a much younger experiment appears to be working: the 10-items-or-fewer express self-checkout cut transaction times and bumped satisfaction scores—while surprisingly increasing the use of human cashiers. Perhaps people just like their robots with limits.

Wastebook

• “pain-in-the-ass procurement.” Otherwise known as “procurement.”

• “Gorpcore” - sounds like anything you buy at REI.

Converting the world to D&D settings

Here’s a fun thing to do with ChatGPT, have it make pictures for your D&D settings. When I’m walking around, I see scenes that feel like they’d be fun in some printed adventure. You can ChatGPT to create those for you!

For example, here’s an original picture, taken in a park here in the Netherlands that I frequent:

I’ve developed a prompt to create the kind of rough, line-drawn style that I like for D&D visuals, resulting in:

In a near-by park, there’s a tree that’s grown up around the cement curb that used to enclose it, pretty standard urban stuff:

You take that, and tell ChatGPT this: “Use this one, but make it look larger like an ancient ruin that has a large tree growing through and has cracked open the wall like you see in the original. Can you make the ruins look other and not so symmetrical, the hundreds of years have worn them down and suited them here and there.”

As with a lot of my D&D and AI, uh, “work,” the point isn’t to be perfect or great, it’s to boost the fun I have. It’s a type of “fun productivity.” Generating those images takes no time at all.

Here’s the prompt I started using. It was, of course, written by ChatGPT with a little bit of prompting from me:

Generate in the style of gritty, 1980s fantasy illustration, drawing heavily from the black-and-white aesthetic of The Savage Sword of Conan, the dense linework of Albrecht Dürer, and the chaotic, cluttered compositions of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Art should be primarily black and white, using heavy ink, crosshatching, and etching-like detail to convey form, shadow, and texture. Selective muted color is allowed only if it enhances atmosphere or storytelling.

Figures should be realistic, expressive, and grounded—a mix of young and old, scarred and beautiful, weary and noble. Avoid heroic idealization: these are lived-in characters shaped by hardship and dirt, not fashion models or video game avatars. Body types, faces, and posture should reflect diversity in age, experience, and culture. Characters may be adorned in patchwork armor, practical gear, or ceremonial garb, but always rendered with tactile detail and believable wear.

Scenes should feel chaotic, cluttered, and richly lived-in, with elements of medieval squalor, fantastical decay, and mysterious ritual. Environments—forests, ruins, inns, alleyways, courts—should have depth and texture, with weathered stone, tangled roots, hand-carved iconography, and organic asymmetry. Always favor texture over polish, mood over symmetry, and story over spectacle.

This is not a clean or sanitized world. Show mud, scars, broken teeth, rusted iron, sagging pouches, old tattoos, cheap jewelry, burned-out torches, mossy ruins, ragged cloaks, and crowded shelves. Facial expressions matter: stern glares, crooked smirks, haunted eyes, and world-weary stares should tell the viewer more than dialogue ever could.

The overall tone should be grimy, grounded, mysterious, and sometimes grimly humorous—not glossy or cinematic. Avoid all anime or cartoon styling, smooth gradients, heroic posing, or digital cleanliness. Do not idealize figures or reduce them to archetypes. Favor realism and imperfection.

Think: a dwarf passed out under a tree with a broken flask; a swamp hag grinning beneath hanging moss; a mercenary queen in patched armor confronting a weasel-faced noble; a ragged adventurer polishing her blade beside the corpse of a demon. Everything should suggest a story already in progress.

I haven’t tried this too much with Midjourney. You can get Midjourney to generate images in that style I like, but it takes a lot of work. As ever, Midjourney’s flaw is that it slides back into cinematic, perfect image generation. Also, I haven’t figured out getting Midjourney to consistently generate the same character and general image over and over. ChatGPT does it extremely well.

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This is a great talk from Paula on the history, and repeated history, of platform as a product. You know, basically, platform engineering. She was one of the early pioneers of it and has been involved ever since.

The coyote trap. - “Call it whatever you will, I don’t care, but we’re on a new path and companies are doing more than ever to extract every ounce of value out of everyone in the payroll system. I talked to a long time friend and former colleague who went from team leader to division leader overnight. No title change. No additional compensation. Just do more."

The coyote trap. - “Call it whatever you will, I don’t care, but we’re on a new path and companies are doing more than ever to extract every ounce of value out of everyone in the payroll system. I talked to a long time friend and former colleague who went from team leader to division leader overnight. No title change. No additional compensation. Just do more."

Pricing: A List of Tactics - Some mind-tricks to play with pricing.

Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor? - Checks out on both sides.

When was peak message in a bottle? - Only 80s kids will get this: “grandfather clocks; suits of armour; quicksand; spontaneous human combustion.” Also: big foot and UFOs.

Anthropic closes $2.5 billion credit facility - “Annualized revenue reached $2 billion in the first quarter, the company confirmed, more than doubling from a $1 billion rate in the prior period. Revenue chief Kate Jensen said in a recent interview with CNBC that the number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually with Anthropic jumped eightfold from a year ago."

Platform Engineering: Evolution or Rebranding? - Get yourself a PaaS. // “the idea of a dedicated team removing frictions by building tools and resuable abstractions is an idea that’s here to stay."

My Content

Two Software Defined episodes this week:

"I used to eat 7-Eleven pizza," startups, open source, and more, with Sarah Christoff - After an extensive discussion of 7-Eleven pizza cuisine, in this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Sarah Christoff. They discuss working at startups, the point of startups, working in open source and balancing commercial and community interests, moving to Europe, and more!

This is a “hit by pitch” - This week, we discuss Zenoss finally getting acquired, Databricks buying Neon, and the debut of WizOS. Plus, updates on OpenAI, Google, Apple—and hot takes on Marmite, Vegemite, and Emacs. (Just Matt and Brandon, I was away.)

Keep your Spring Apps Up-to-date

Webinar alert! If you manage Spring apps in your organization, keeping them up-to-date probably seems like an impossibility. There’s help! Check out this overview from the Spring folks on the topic:

Keeping applications secure and up to date is more challenging than ever. Upgrades introduce transitive dependencies that can break compatibility; some projects require migrations due to end-of-life decisions, and security vulnerabilities demand urgent attention. While security teams integrate vulnerability scanners to detect risks, developers often struggle with lengthy and unpredictable remediation efforts, leading to delays, uncertainty, and disruption to business priorities. Join us for this exclusive webinar to learn how Spring Application Advisor (SAA) can simplify the Spring app upgrade process, so you can maintain security and stability without derailing your roadmap.

Register for it and check it out on May 22nd. Or, just catch the replay.

Wastebook

• “a usefully belligerent attitude” Tim Bray.

• “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” And, I said, I realized that this is what I had been doing. Worrying about tomorrow. Anticipating the worst possible outcome. “Exactly,” he said. “Since earliest childhood. Worrying is all mixed up in your mind with loving. You don’t think you can love without worrying.” - Notes to John, Joan Didion

• And: “I said I wasn’t sure where we left off. Dr. MacKinnon said why not begin where you are now. I said I wasn’t sure where I was now, life seemed rather scattered.”

• “The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom.” Craig Mod.

• “Unstatus.” Westenberg.

• “There’s a really big body, and it’s not quite buried.”

• Doing a tiny amount is better than nothing, which is sort of what habit building is.

• “They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful. And theirs is weak.” Beef-talk.

• “defaults instead of opinions.” Matt Gemmell.

• “Another thing to keep in mind is that therapy often isn’t a repair process; it’s a perspective-changing process instead.” Matt G.

• “Mailchimp has grown and mutated to serve a set of needs and cus­tomers that I truly don’t understand. Not that it shouldn’t! Well — I mean, I wish it wouldn’t. But it did” // A helpful marketing/product strategy thing to keep in mind: sometimes your customer base changes, and that can be totally fine.

Relevant to your interests

• Shadow AI Isn’t a Threat: It’s a Wake-up Call - “Shadow AI isn’t the enemy – it’s a signal. Shadow AI tells you that your teams want AI, they need AI and they’re willing to move without you if they have to. That’s not just a risk. It’s a roadmap. This is your chance to build something better: secure, governed AI enablement that works the way your teams do.”

• A2A Protocol: The Universal Language for AI Agents

• AI agents drive Boomi’s vision for scalable automation - Adding MCP support.

• Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor? - checks out, in both directions. I don’t ever recommend reading the comments, but after some predictably dumb ones, there’s some interesting, additional thinking in the comments.

• Learning to Reason for Long-Form Story Generation - I can’t read Math-Greek, so don’t really know what’s going on here. But it looks helpful for playing D&D with the robot.

• Why is AI not in your productivity statistics? - I like one of the ideas here: when AI makes things better, and those things don’t obviously increase sales/profit (“growth”) or save money, it’s easy to think it has no ROI. Increasing quality of life with productivity is hard to capture in GDP, so to speak.

• news that stays news - What’s old to you is completely new to younger people, no matter how old the text is: “One of the things that’s great about being the kind of teacher I am is that you spend your life introducing new people to old things: when my students fall in love with Bonhoeffer or Simone Weil or John Donne or Pascal — things that happened this very term — it’s all new to them.” // Or: every second someone new is born who’s never watched The Flintstones.

• Revisiting the clouds - “Fast forward to today, and the PaaS market has been significantly reshaped, largely by the rise of Kubernetes and other technologies. The landscape is very different. Apparently, somewhere along the line we lost the ease of deployment that platforms like Heroku and Cloud Foundry were well known for … progress” // Indeed…

• Why so many IT projects go so horribly wrong - Latest in “why do IT projects fail?” research.

• Texas’ Regulatory Landscape - ”Texas is the 5th most regulated state in the US” // I wouldn’t have expected top 5!

• Mexico and China didn’t take manufacturing jobs from the Rust Belt - ”A big missing part of the story: Interstate competition. The Rust Belt’s manufacturing decline isn’t primarily about jobs going to Mexico. It’s about jobs going to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.”

• Blitzscaling for tyrants - more on (consumer?) tech startup culture being applied to the US federal government.

• Americans are losing the taste for plant-based milk - and Oatly is feeling the pain - “Riding an alt-milk wave, Oatly’s revenues nearly doubled every year from 2015 to 2020 — but shares of the Swedish milk maker are down some 98% from their 2021 peak, and in the latest quarter, Oatly’s growth finally went sub-zero.”

• Philips debuts 3D printable components to repair products - I don’t know much about this area, but seems cool.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking (10% off with the code CLG10). PlatformCon, June 23rd to 27th, speaking, online.

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I’m back from Cloud Foundry Day in Palo Alto. Nice trip with lots of time to see people.