For decades the deal was the same. You rent the software, bend your business around it, pay by the seat, month after month. When something is missing, you wait for the vendor’s next release.
That deal is not going away. But it is losing its monopoly. Software matters more than ever. What is changing is how it comes to be, and who it serves.
The material
There are tools now that let a business shape its own system: build, move, change, extend. A new workflow, a new field, a new report. You describe it, and it exists. In days, not years.
Software is no longer a rigid product you rent. It has become a material you shape around the way you work.
The business no longer bends around the software. The software bends around the business. That reverses a relationship that has shaped software for thirty years.
So everyone builds their own now?
No. And that is the part the excitement skips.
The analyst Benedict Evans put it plainly: most people and most companies are not tool-builders. Not for lack of technology. The deeper reasons show up in any business.
Living with a problem every day is not the same as seeing it as a system you could build. Live with a detour long enough and it becomes the road.
Knowing your own work is not the same as designing the tool that should carry it.
And a prototype is not software that holds up every day. Data, integration, security, adoption, upkeep: that is where most self-builds die.
The bottleneck has moved
The new tools cut the cost of building. They do not cut the cost of judgment.
The question is no longer: can we build it? The question is: do we know what needs to be built? The second one is harder. It does not live in the technology. It lives in the mechanics of the business: where decisions stall, where knowledge lives in two heads, where a process only runs because someone rescues it every day.
Build before you have answered that, and you automate your detours. Faster than ever.
What this means for a business
The bottleneck first, then the tool. When a build is the answer, it gets shaped around the business, not the other way round. Built together, then handed over so the business can carry it forward on its own. No artificial dependency, no waiting for the next release.
The material is here. It is better than it has ever been.
The question is not what you could build with it. The question is what has to change.
Patrick Thole, Disruption Dynamics, Zürich
disruption-dynamics.ch