The products for cubicle dwellers may not be the magical miracles we imagine from Silicon Valley, but the world is running on the tedious technology that tedious organizations need to do tedious but important things. Many of the companies selling this technology are making rivers of money, even though only five people are capable of explaining what, for example, the software giant SAP did.
I don’t know what technology my employer uses to process my salaries. Most of us will never see Amazon’s computer servers that enable Netflix on our TVs. The U.S. health care system relies heavily on patient records from a software company called Epic.
You may not know what Oracle is, but you probably won’t have direct contact with one of its databases if you buy anything online. We’ll never write a valentine with that kind of tedious software, but we need it to work.
Dull things can also make what we do better, like enable telemedicine calls or help us check for diapers before we drive to the store.
Many technologies designed for businesses stink or are stuck in the past, but these are the nuts and bolts of it all. Companies that make dull technology for organizations are likely to last longer than dozens of Doritos-on-demand start-ups. And this is gold mine. Businesses and governments are expected to spend approximately $ 4.5 trillion on technology this year. Some of the most important technology companies in the world, such as Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and ServiceNow, are tedious.
Boring just doesn’t pay off. It can also be a political asset. Facebook can’t buy a package of chewing gum without government regulators who suspect the company intends to cause global tooth decay. And when it tries to buy any company, every antitrust alarm sounds.
But in January, Microsoft announced its nearly $ 70 billion acquisition of video game titanium Activision Blizzard.
Regulators may still block the acquisition, but Microsoft may try partly because of its identity as the less controversial of tech superpowers.
Microsoft has more revenue and greater value than Facebook’s core company, Meta. But most make products that businesses use to do things like crunch data and not, for example, communication tools that are abused to spread conspiracy theories.
Mark Gorenberg has dedicated his professional life to snooze technology. In the late 1980s, he worked at Sun Microsystems, whose technologies such as Unix and Java remain in almost every piece of current technology. Gorenberg described the Sun as “very boring but it energizes everyone.”
Since then, Gorenberg has worked for investment firms that specialize in supporting young companies that typically sell poor technology to businesses. He told me that many of the so-called enterprise tech companies are not yet the most cutting-edge. But he speculates that the dull sector will be the hotbed of exciting inventions.
Gorenberg talks about innovations like Microsoft’s recently released technology that essentially helps the software write itself. His investment firm, Zetta Venture Partners, is supporting a start-up that scans records of vehicle crashes to conduct assessments of insurance claims and another that sees potential network failures before they remove the internet. He talks about a future where boring technology remains important but there is a bit of wonder as well.
If this technology can be exciting and also help us all, great. But there will always be a foundation of tedious technology that touches our lives and the world – even if we don’t know it exists.