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Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

So in the last few weeks, there's been a dramatic sell-off in software stocks driven by the anxiety that companies will, instead of paying for someone like Salesforce and Microsoft, simply build their own software.

It is a genuinely stupid assumption based on analysts and reporters that simply do not care about the truth. In their

mind, one can simply type, Build Me Salesforce now into Claude Code and have it baff out an

identical, functional clone that's compliant, secure, stable, or because somebody was able to bonk it

on the head enough times to spit out something that sort of look like a tool like Trello maybe or a personal website.

Look, when you pay a software company, even a dog shit mediocre one, a monthly fee,

you're not just paying them to access the software, but to take away the burden of maintenance

that comes with running a software company.

Minor things like currency changes or time zone shifting can cause major problems

in systems that aren't built with intention. You know, like something in LLM would spit out,

and things get even more complicated when you start connecting other systems of record,

like billing or a customer's personal information, especially if they're in Europe, by the way.

Plan to have any of that information actually connect with the customer's systems, where you're

going to need a SOC2 order, and you're definitely going to need to make sure it's got rock-solid security

so that nobody can swipe all of that data and then you get sued. I also assume you're going to

effectively take an engineer off of one of your teams, probably for good, to be honest,

to maintain your new internal Salesforce, Monday, Microsoft 365, and Notion clones.

Your Trello clone as well. Probably your Asana. I mean, how much software are you going to build?

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