About

Business software, and the arguments that decided which of it you use.

Every system a company runs on won an argument at some point. Lotus 1-2-3 won the spreadsheet and then lost it to a platform decision made years earlier. SAP shipped R/3 in 1992 and its customers are still migrating off it. Salesforce launched in 1999 arguing that software should be rented rather than installed, and the industry followed. This site writes those arguments up one at a time.

The through-line is lock-in: the relational model published in 1970 that still decides your schema, the close that shapes every accounting system, the licence that follows headcount, and the unglamorous migration work that eats the budget every time. Where an implementation went wrong, the piece is written from the public record.

A thraex was a Roman gladiator type, armed with a small square shield and a short curved sword, matched by the rules against a specific opponent. It seemed a fitting name for software sold as a matchup.

The six sections