Selling shoes on the internet, the risks of waterfall enterprise AI
Plus links and fun finds from the World Wide Web
Just links and wastebook today.
Relative to your interests
Spring Boot 3.3 Boosts Performance, Security, and Observability - All these years later, Spring is still in wide use and still evolving.
‘You are a helpful mail assistant,’ and other Apple Intelligence instructions - Not that many, but interesting.
Gartner Predicts 30% of Generative AI Projects Will Be Abandoned After Proof of Concept By End of 2025 - ”At least 30% of generative AI (GenAI) projects will be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025, due to poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs or unclear business value, according to Gartner, Inc. ” // Also a chart with rough estimates for initial and ongoing costs: input for an ROI model. // The other take here is that you need to start slow and small with enterprise AI: no one knows what will work, what good business cases are, what customers (and channels/suppliers/employees) will rebel against, etc.
Nike: An Epic Saga of Value Destruction - The risks of shifting to a direct, Internet-based go-to-market. And, also, of focusing only on growing revenue from existing customers instead of also getting new customers: 'Obviously, the former CMO had decided to ignore “How Brands Grow” by Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing Science, Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia. Otherwise, he would have known that: 1) if you focus on existing consumers, you won’t grow. Eventually, your business will shrink (as it is “surprisingly” happening right now). 2) Loyalty is not a growth driver. 3) Loyalty is a function of penetration. If you grow market penetration and market share, you grow loyalty (and usually revenues). 4) If you try to grow only loyalty (and LTV) of existing consumers (spending an enormous amount of money and time to get something that is very difficult and expensive to achieve), you don’t grow penetration and market share (and therefore revenues). As simple as that… ' // A little more commentary here.
Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From - So cyberpunk! // ”the YouTuber who was scrolling through images of rotting old people with bugs on them.” // Related: ‘we don’t need the term “slop”. Consumers have decided that “AI” in its entirety is bullshit.’
Teaching to the Test. Why It Security Audits Aren’t Making Stuff Safer - Bullshit Work in enterprise security. // Plus, why not start with basics before going advanced: ‘The world would be better off if organizations stopped wasting so much time and money on these vendor solutions and instead stuck to much more basic solutions. Perhaps if we could just start with “have we patched all the critical CVEs in our organization” and “did we remove the shared username and password from the cloud database with millions of call records”, then perhaps AFTER all the actual work is done we can have some fun and inject dangerous software into the most critical parts of our employees devices.’
The Six Five: Advancing DevOps: Infrastructure as Code, Platform Engineering and Gen AI - “we see in our latest research that 24% of organizations are looking to release code on an hourly basis, yet only 8% are able to do so.”
Why Is Demand Marketing An Obstacle To Its Own Success? - ‘Too many marketing subfunctions (demand/ABM, field marketing, customer marketing, digital, and events) create strategies unique to their function, independent from the others. Marketers often say that they have a “unified” plan, but it’s more like a PowerPoint deck with “chapters” for each team’s individual plan. This approach prevents marketers from orchestrating programs to reduce overlap and waste, and what’s worse, it has a direct, negative impact on buyers and customers.’
The Prompt Warrior - Posts on prompts for all sorts of things.
fabric/patterns - Whole bunch of prompts on a range of topics, even D&D!
Why CSV is still king - We have a running joke on the podcast that every (enterprise) app needs CSV export. It’s only 10% a joke.
Epic corporate jargon alternatives - Poetic alternatives to business bullshit jargon.
2025 Demand and ABM Budget Planning Guide: Do Better With Less - Enterprise software marketing budgets mostly flat, if not less: ”On the surface, it may appear as if most budgets are increasing, as 82% of global B2B marketing decision-makers report their budgets being increased by 1% or more. But once you adjust for inflation, it’s the same old story, as only 35% of organizations will see a real increase in budgets (with 31% of the 35% saying that the increases would be in the 5–10% range and 4% saying that their budgets would increase by 10% or more).”
The Dutch love Egg Salad and Potato Salad
This is in our small, neighborhood store. The larger ones have even more!
Wastebook
“Kerfulle.”
“gas station sushi” ROtL, 547.
Logoff
This is a really well put together presentation, with good content. It manages to introduce one, simple idea (and notice how she returns to/reminds you of it at the end), and yet not make it TED-talk level surface-level-simple. It gives you practical things to do if you want to work on “developer productivity.” And, it’s a perfect example of giving a vendor-pitch that doesn’t seem like a vendor pitch (one of the chief skills of a thought leader): customer cases with ROI, mention of the product being sold, and even screenshot-demos! It’s also re-usable and mine-able for EBCs, sales meeting, etc.