There are certain moments in life that burn themselves into your memory forever.
My wedding day.
The birth of my three daughters.
The day a man in a slightly-too-tight suit told me, with the emotional range of a fax machine, that the company where I was working had just evaporated.
This is a story about the third one.
Back in the 1990s, when the internet made noises like a distressed robot and loading a webpage required both patience and a packed lunch, I worked for a publishing consultancy.
And not just any consultancy. Oh no.
We built Very Important Software.
The kind of software that cost £200,000, which in 1997 was roughly equivalent to the GDP of a small island nation.
Our clients included names like Routledge, Shell, and Rolls-Royce.
We dealt in Serious Things:
- Highly technical publications
- Mission-critical documentation
- Data structured in something called SGML, which was like HTML but with more angles and fewer friends
We could take vast amounts of complex information and output it to:
- Printed manuals
- Intranets, which were like the internet but more beige
- CD-ROMs, which were the future, assuming the future had a tray that popped out of your computer
We even worked on things like the Complete Works of Shakespeare on CD-ROM, which I assume William Shakespeare would have been thrilled about, had he not been extremely dead.
Everything we did was:
- Expensive
- Sophisticated
- Technically brilliant
We were, in short, absolutely convinced we were winning.
Then one day, something unusual happened.
We were told to stop working and go to the training room.
Now, in most companies, this means one of two things:
- You are about to learn something useful
- You are about to learn something extremely not useful, like how to “synergise”
In this case, it was option three:
You are about to lose your job.
Five minutes later, the Managing Director walked in.
He looked like a man who had recently been informed that gravity was no longer optional.
He said, and I remember this word for word:
“It’s not good news. The business is going into administration, and you’re all being made redundant. Please go and collect your belongings and leave the building. Leave your laptops.”
And that was it.
No build-up.
No comforting metaphors.
No biscuits.
Just:
- You had a job
- Now you do not have a job
- Please exit the premises in an orderly fashion, like disappointed shoppers
Here’s the thing that sticks in my head.
This didn’t happen because we were bad at what we did.
We were extremely good.
The problem was that, while we were busy being extremely good, the world had changed.
It was 1997.
The browser wars were heating up.
On one side you had Netscape Navigator.
On the other, Internet Explorer.
They were both racing to do something quite alarming:
Make the web actually useful.
Suddenly, things that used to require:
- £200,000
- A team of specialists
- Several months
- And a man named Colin who only understood SGML
…could be done in a browser.
Not perfectly.
Not beautifully.
But well enough.
And this is where everything fell apart.
Because our management team made a perfectly logical decision.
Unfortunately, it was also completely wrong.
They said:
“Our solution is better.”
And they were right.
It was better.
- More powerful
- More structured
- More flexible
But the market said:
“We would like something that is 60% as good, for half the price, and ideally does not require Colin.”
And that was that.
Game over.
Not because we were stupid.
Not because we were lazy.
But because we were looking down at our own technology, instead of looking up at what was happening around us.
I have never really recovered from this.
Not in a dramatic, lie-on-the-floor kind of way.
More in the sense that, whenever I see a big shift happening and people failing to notice it, I feel it physically. A kind of cold jolt. The occasional 3am demon moment.
Because once you’ve seen it happen, you start to recognise the pattern.
It always looks something like this:
- A new technology appears
- It is worse than the existing one
- Everyone laughs at it
- It improves very quickly
- Suddenly it is “good enough”
- And then, quite abruptly, you are carrying a cardboard box out of an office
And here’s the thing.
I see it everywhere right now.
Entire industries gently whispering to themselves:
“Yes, but ours is better.”
While the world quietly replies:
“We know. We just don’t care.”
Legacy businesses clinging to what used to work.
Beautiful, intricate systems solving problems that people no longer have.
Teams full of very smart people, heads down, focused entirely on improving something that is slowly becoming irrelevant.
Not because it’s bad.
But because something else is:
- Faster
- Cheaper
- Simpler
- And increasingly good enough
This shift feels much bigger.
Because this time, it’s not just about how we publish information.
It’s about how we:
- Build things
- Create things
- Think about work itself
The pivots required now are not small.
They are not:
- “Let’s tweak the pricing”
- “Let’s add a feature”
They are:
- “We might need to rethink everything.”
And that is painful.
But not as painful as standing in a training room, being told to leave your laptop behind.
If there is a lesson here, it’s not:
“Always chase the newest thing.”
That way madness lies, along with several abandoned cryptocurrency projects.
The lesson is:
Pay attention.
Look up.
Watch what people are actually doing, not what they say they should be doing.
And when something that is clearly worse starts getting traction anyway, don’t laugh.
Because somewhere, in a slightly-too-bright training room, there is a man clearing his throat.
And he is about to say:
“It’s not good news.”
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