About a week ago I was at PegaWorld. I’ll tell you what, for a rather dry business application – business Process Management, those guys know how to party. That being said, it is a really powerful platform to help automate existing processes or to interact with other systems to put a wrapper around the inputs and outputs of that system. That’s pretty powerful. Pega is one of those pieces of software that has the potential to “disrupt” the way traditional software is built. Essentially it eliminates the need to actually develop software the old fashion way, and allows users to create process flows that then generate the underlying Java. Now that doesn’t mean all coding will go away, especially at the interface API level, but it’s still a huge step forward to leveling that playing field.

I think this raise an interesting point, software is going to eat the world according to a lot of VC type folks. However, what happens when a piece of software enables more people to do what software was enabling people to do? I think it’d drive down the cost of enabling automated solutions. Not only are there super high level “languages” like Pega, there’s also a great deal of higher level programming languages out there, such as Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Python, and others that help to develop the application as you’re building it. Swift from Apple is another such language. It shortens the learning cycle. I’m partially through building an App in Rails and I’d never used it before, it’d be a lot harder to do the same in Java alone.

All of this really drives a concern – we could just automate bad processes. Things that doing faster don’t actually help any customer or ourselves actually accomplish any sort of goal. This is a problem if you don’t actually understand what you’re trying to do. This is something that I think a lot of startups miss – who cares that I can really efficiently do something, when some thing isn’t really worth doing? It’s a waste of time, energy and activity to do that. Software eating the world or other types of automation are only useful to anyone if they actually work to improve the underlying structure they are being built upon. PegaWorld had some interesting talks of people that looked into this, but it was basically tangential when it needs to be at the core of everything that’s happening.

Apparently in the show, Silicon Valley, every startup ends up saying that this product is going to make the world better. Simply saying that doesn’t make it so – I’m sure that Ubisoft and EA believe that their games are going to make the world a better place. You could argue that by excluding something from the next Assassins Creed game really did make the world better by driving a conversation about the choices that developers and companies make when bringing a product to market – and how poorly those decisions can go for the company that makes them. It’s important to understand the root cause of a problem as well as any risks changes pose to the business when you don’t deliver on something you are selling.