> the ultimate measure of business is money / resources
That's not untrue, but perhaps too reductive a view on business, as it ignores "soft" market factors like being primarily risk-oriented vs revenue-oriented, the company's reputation, leadership vision, employee fitness to perform, technical debt, etc.
Yes, they all boil down to more or less revenue, profit and growth, but if you only ever look at the spreadsheets, you'll be divorced from reality.
> Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.
A major selling point for custom software beyond the simple Excel-like CRUD variants is its adoption of sectoral or company assumptions and goals. Yes, that introduces rigidity, but not all rigidity is bad. Most if not all sectors have standards and regulations to comply with, as well as market constraints.
I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business, whereas bad rigidity is due to leaky abstractions or poorly bounded contexts. The latter indicates the product is maladapted to day-to-day business operations.
> I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business
Another reason would be scale. The flexibility in spreadsheets usually goes hand in hand with having to deal with inconsistencies and from what we've seen that mechanism is usually a person or persons which does eventually break down at a certain volume.
e.g. a farmer getting 20 different purchase orders a week, all in their weird unique format and trying to convert all of it into a single format by hand
That's not untrue, but perhaps too reductive a view on business, as it ignores "soft" market factors like being primarily risk-oriented vs revenue-oriented, the company's reputation, leadership vision, employee fitness to perform, technical debt, etc.
Yes, they all boil down to more or less revenue, profit and growth, but if you only ever look at the spreadsheets, you'll be divorced from reality.
> Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.
A major selling point for custom software beyond the simple Excel-like CRUD variants is its adoption of sectoral or company assumptions and goals. Yes, that introduces rigidity, but not all rigidity is bad. Most if not all sectors have standards and regulations to comply with, as well as market constraints.
I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business, whereas bad rigidity is due to leaky abstractions or poorly bounded contexts. The latter indicates the product is maladapted to day-to-day business operations.