From The Book of Lairs, volume one.
If OpenAI fails, the most likely mode is the Yahoo path: not a dramatic collapse but a slow fade into irrelevance through a thousand mediocre product extensions. ChatGPT becomes a utility everyone uses but nobody pays premium for. Enterprise goes to companies with better compliance stories. The consumer product goes ad-supported. Revenue grows but margins compress. The valuation becomes unjustifiable. They never die – they just stop mattering.
Proof of value lies in the results. To date, more than 90% of the top 10,000 VMware customers have purchased VCF, including nine of the top 10 Fortune companies. Leading companies such as Audi, ING Bank, Lloyds Banking Group and Walmart are adopting VCF and deepening their partnerships with Broadcom. Broadcom’s own internal IT teams have adopted this technology and a cloud operating model to consolidate datacenters and toolchains while improving overall system reliability, improving time to provision applications and infrastructure, and decreasing costs. Most important, the number of workloads managed by Broadcom IT increased during this private cloud transformation."
🔗 One Platform for All Workloads - VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog
“Greedy work” refers to jobs in which earnings are convex in hours - meaning that working longer, more continuous, and less flexible hours is rewarded disproportionately rather than proportionally. {Summarized by the robot.}
And, from Claudia Goldin:
Greedy work can be defined as a job that pays disproportionately more on a per-hour basis when someone works a greater number of hours or has less control over those hours. It could be a rush job, a demanding client who calls at 11 PM, or a supervisor who asks that the worker give up a vacation day for the project. The firm has deemed the additional payment worth it to have the work done over more hours, at a particular time, or during odd hours. The other critical aspect is that the worker agrees to do it at that wage. Supply and demand, all over again.
AI Is Normal Now - The Enterprise Is Not
Original ContentEnterprise AI needs new apps, enterprise AI doesn’t need new platforms - I’ve been circling a theme this week after reading “AI as a Normal Technology” (Spring, 2025). This is some stream of conscious on it.
Enterprises are gonna enterprise-y, especially with AI. Also available in LinkedIn, if you prefer that kind of thing.
A series of OODA loops, Software Defined Talk #559 - This week, we discuss the future of SaaS, OpenAI vs.
Tanzu Catsup: The Risk of Relying on AI for Platform Engineering
Internal development teams and executives are increasingly looking at AI to automate the creation of internal developer platforms. However, cobbling together open-source components with AI is a far cry from building a scalable, secure, and “enterprise-grade” environment. In this conversation, we explore why betting your internal infrastructure on AI-generated platforms is a high-stakes risk and why human-led architecture still dictates the long-term success of a platform.
There’s also an excerpt.
Relative to your interests, Friday afternoon
AI money is absurd again - Anthropic at $380B, Waymo at 360x revenue - while software CEOs get a 2026 “grow up” playbook. Meanwhile, enterprise AI reality stays slow and messy, coding hype surges, and burnout + Ballard remind us what the work rhythm used to look like.
I use the HA HA! BUSINESS! meme a few times each decade. The original is pretty small and pixel’y, so I asked the robot to upscale it and it did a damn fine job:
Related to your interests, Thursday
Europe doubles down on sovereign cloud, Anthropic shakes markets, and AI seeps into meetings, legislation, and IT services. Plus: Java for AI, portable agent “skills,” ERP disdain, and cultural scale reality checks.
Ask yourself: which lock-in would an enterprise CFO prefer: Being locked into a CRM that holds 15 years of customer data, process customizations, and institutional context that would take two years and $50 million to migrate? Or, being locked into a foundation model that could be swapped for a competitor by changing an API endpoint?