A distributor went bankrupt during an ERP rollout
The FoxMeyer collapse in 1996 became the standard citation for an implementation that took the company with it.
Lotus owned the spreadsheet until Excel took Windows first
Lotus 1-2-3 dominated DOS. Excel shipped for Windows earlier and better, and the platform decided the application.
Muscle memory for a decade, then a liability: the port that kept the slash key inside a graphical shell satisfied nobody, and arrived a year after Windows 3.0 had already made Excel the default.
1970
Codd publishes the relational model, and the schema question is settled for fifty years.
1992
SAP ships R/3. Its customers are still migrating off it.
1999
Salesforce argues that software should be rented rather than installed.
The extreme case, and it convicted people
The Post Office Horizon scandal is the furthest a software defect has reached into people's lives, and the record is now extensive.
A fighting style defined by what it was matched against
The thraex fought with a small square shield and a curved sica, and the pairing with the murmillo is the point — each was built to test the other.
The pricing model shapes the product more than the code
Per-seat and consumption licensing pull a product in opposite directions, and the billing decision reaches the roadmap.
Where to start
- Renting software was the whole argumentSalesforce launched in 1999 arguing that software should be rented and run by somebody else, which was contested for a decade.
- The month-end close is the deadline the software exists forAn accounting system is shaped by one recurring event: the period close, and everything else is arranged around it.
- One company built a business on being first to ship itOracle turned the relational model into a commercial database earlier than its competitors and priced accordingly.
- Half a billion spent, then abandonedLidl ended its SAP programme in 2018 after years of work, reportedly because the system could not be reconciled with how the business already counted stock.
- A small shield is a decision about mobilityThe parmula covered less and weighed less, which set the whole tempo of the match.
Set and printed with the support of
The colophon
