My Big Bet

Somewhere around 1990, I bought a computer I could not afford.

My wife was not so quietly angry, and the only thing I could think to tell her was, "I want to go back to school and work on my master's degree."

There was no real thought there. It was just a spur-of-the-moment response to somebody who can really get angry.

That took me to Regis University, a master's program in Information Systems, PowerBuilder, VB, C#, SQL Server, and a long career building custom applications for companies that needed them.

We designed the databases, built the front ends, tested with users, deployed when it was acceptable, and moved on to the next thing.

Then the web came along. Then SaaS took over.

SaaS has done a lot of good. I am not begrudging it. But companies got used to changing their processes to fit software someone else built. They lost some of the ability—and maybe even the thought—that they could build software for themselves.

My big bet is that AI changes that.

I do not mean every company will rewrite every SaaS product. That would be silly.

I mean companies will look at their backlog, knock a lot of it out much faster, replace the narrow pieces of SaaS that never fit, and start building software around the way they actually work.

Then, after the backlog is gone, they will ask a better question:

"What can we do now that we have never been able to do?"

That is my big bet.