Diderot had a dressing gown, you have Salesforce

In 1769, the French Philosopher Denis Diderot wrote an essay about a beautiful scarlet dressing gown that he was gifted. He absolutely loved it. But suddenly, compared to it, everything around him looked shabby and inelegant.

He replaced his old straw chair with a beautiful leather one, his desk with an expensive writing table, and so on. Until he finally ended up in debt.

In that essay, he wrote “I was absolute master of my old dressing gown” … “but I have become a slave to my new one”.

I see a similar process taking place when I look at how some organisations build their software stacks.

It starts with a single tool, usually adopted for the wrong reasons – not because it’s the right fit: because it looks serious, projects success, is the one everyone else uses, … You get the picture. That picture is the dressing gown.

Salesforce is a good example. A small team decide they need a CRM and opt for Salesforce because it’s the one everyone talks about and all the big corps use it.

Then they find out it’s really complex and they need to hire a consultant to configure it. Then they realise their email platform doesn’t talk to it the right way, so that gets an upgrade.Then, when they want to see data across both systems, they decide to add a reporting layer. Tableau (also owned by Salesforce) is suggested. Then the data needs constant feeding, so someone has to work on that. Suddenly, you need a part-time admin, an email tool upgrade, a reporting platform, and a process you didn’t even imagine before.

Diderot concluded that his beautiful new dressing gown had imposed its own logic on everything around it. The same thing can happen with software. The plan is never to build a new software stack, it’s to look like an organisation that has its act together. But, step by step, the stack accumulates because of that one decision.

Colin