Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

I was also thinking of all those little online tools that solve trivial problems like formatting JSON, decoding URL parameters etc.

Here's my story about revolutionary improvement in business software.

I've spent the last five years or so in the "enterprise blockchain" space. This term has been progressively diluted over the years; a typical enterprise blockchain deployment has no blocks or chains. Even so the nub of the concept remains. There are hashes, signatures, transactions etc.

Why did the business world go so crazy about blockchains? Because it sounded like revolutionary change. These executives mostly don't care about cryptocurrencies or payments, but they cared a lot about the idea of peer to peer business processes. Simply moving structured information between organisations is by no means a solved problem and worse, it's one that very rarely gets attention from the wider software industry. There was EDI in the 1980s. Then nothing for a long time until XML came along, and a whole bunch of inter-firm protocols were "upgraded" to use XML. Then nothing until blockchain. This is one reason why you so often hear of business processes that still use fax machines, or emailing PDFs/excel files around. IT works well for sharing inside the organisation and pretty terribly between it.

Here's what the conventional pre-blockchain approach to inter-org business process improvement looks like:

1. Identify a shared business process problem.

2. Create a consortium or shared for-profit venture to implement it, get the most likely customers to buy in. This can easily take years because the customers are likely to be competitors.

3. Hope that this consortium somehow manages to get lucky and hires competent tech people, because sure as hell the firms that want the software don't have them. This step often goes wrong.

4. Hope that somehow this group creates a usable, reliable product that actually solves their business need. This step also often goes wrong and the newly birthed software firm produces something too far from the real problem.

5. Hope that the original members of the consortium actually do the work to start using the solution they paid for. This often takes years.

6. Finally hope that they never get hacked, that your controlling government doesn't end up in a fight with theirs that would mean they can't store your data, hope they don't become dominated by one competitor in the group or grind to a halt due to having a captive market i.e. no incentives to improve anything. Inevitably some of these things happen.

Classic example: SWIFT. But there are many others.

So the idea that firms could just connect directly to each other in an agile manner with interoperable apps seemed like a promise of revolutionary change. Execs like that, it makes them seem bold and visionary.

In practice what you see in these projects is very similar. They don't work in an open source manner, they still create new software firms or non-profit orgs via shared investments. The main difference is that step 5 gets more expensive because now the participants are expected to do some IT work themselves to run P2P nodes. But by the time they reach step 5 the executives are exhausted and just want a low-risk point-and-click hosted experience. Their own IT departments can't handle anything that doesn't look exactly like what they're used to and nobody in charge has enough technical knowledge to argue with them. Plus the executives have ticked the "we are innovative" box and don't want to control their own data anymore, they just want to cut a cheque and have someone else do the work.

So the theoretically revolutionary shift to p2p business processes ends up being P2P in name only. One company ends up writing the software, hosting the nodes and generally just being a conventional SaaS business.

I've come to the conclusion that there won't be any revolutionary steps forward in the business software space, ever, because in the end businesses outside the tech sector have virtually no tolerance for technology risk. They don't understand it, don't want it and really wish the whole concept of "innovation" (read: risky tech projects) would go away.

Except that peasant did not owned the land. Could not make his farm larger nor smaller. If lord decided you will produce more grains instead of vegetables, peasant had to oblige regardless of own preferences. And peasants had to give part of produce to lord. And had to use Lords mills and what not instead of choosing them in free market.

Nor could peasant change occupation or marry without Lords permission.