Enterprise knowledge management has failed for 60 years because buyers select on familiarity over correctness, not because the underlying technology is broken.
Key Takeaways
HP acquired Autonomy for $11.1B after roughly six hours of calls with its founders, then wrote off $8.8B a year later.
SharePoint has 200M monthly active users yet is universally described as a document graveyard – vendor familiarity drives enterprise procurement, not product quality.
Large consulting firms pitched the author’s enterprise contact in the hundreds of thousands, selling their own learning curve rather than a working product.
Familiar-language hiring (Java, .NET) imposes accidental complexity; LLMs prefer token-efficient, semantically stable code, eroding the rationale for human-convenience language choices like Java over Clojure.
Akerlof’s market for lemons explains enterprise software: vendors sell licenses at 90% gross margins, shift execution risk entirely to buyers, and extract value regardless of outcomes.
Hacker News Comment Review
Early commenters accept the familiarity thesis outright; one flagged it as immediately actionable for shaping customer-engagement strategy.
The fire-insurance framing in comments tightens the irony: enterprises buy incumbent vendors as disaster insurance while those same incumbents reliably deliver the disaster.
No substantive technical debate yet on the author’s proposed alternative architecture or the Clojure and Datomic hiring argument.
