Something to Blog About

The longer you spend around the vendor side of the IT industry, the harder it is to stay motivated to 'keep the ball in the air'. As with most things in life, if you show me the incentive, I can show you the behavior.

Vendors posture as visionaries. Partners posture as trusted advisors. Media sites and aggregators posture as independent observers while surviving on the same ecosystem’s sponsorship dollars, access, and mutual back-scratching. Entire categories are inflated by repetition alone. Language is polished until it becomes sterile. Every company claims to be transforming the future. Every product is framed as essential. Every announcement arrives wrapped in the same breathless promise that this time, finally, something meaningful has changed.

That last paragraph was written with ChatGPT and it sounded dramatic but not as dramatic as the rest of the stuff it threw up at me that I ultimately deleted. I asked it to give me an article explaining why I'm restarting Fortify Your Data, originally a podcast/blog thing I had in 2018-2022 and then just got tired of.

I don't have any big epiphanies or overdramatic cynicisms on the way the machine works, I just feel like it makes sense to call out some observations about the tech industry I see - as I see them - so that maybe other people will find value in them and so that maybe I can eventually sell you something one day at one point when I have something to sell.

I have a lot of side projects - software and hardware - but we'll see what lands and sticks, if anything.