ExN

Field note · 27 September 2026

The Moat Was Never the Software

Anyone motivated can now read the documentation and build the ERP. So what is left to compete on?

The playbook in software, for a long time, was to build something not easily replicated — through knowledge, access or sheer investment — and keep building until nobody could catch you.

Today, someone sufficiently motivated could read the published documentation of a major ERP and build it. Smart implementers are skipping that step and building a better version, shaped around one business.

The way we experience software is going to change. It stops being a commodity decision. Buy a piece of it. Buy all of it. Change the paint. Change what it does.

The moat was never the software.

That is a confident thing to say out loud, and confident statements about technology have a poor historical record. So here is a week of confident statements, mostly our own.

  1. "UAT is complete." Sent on a Thursday at 18:58 with ninety-six test cases attached, after hours, so that nobody could reply. Similar energy to the man who said the iPhone would get no significant market share.
  2. "We would be grateful for confirmation of the correct closing date, as the sources available to us differ." To a tender authority. The tender documents disagreed with the tender documents about when the tender closed. A newspaper once said rockets could not work in space and corrected itself forty-nine years later, while three men were on their way to the Moon. There is a process. It is slow.
  3. "Sorry, reply all got the better of me. Will check in the future." We did not check in the future.
  4. "This is in progress." On a thread titled ACTION REQUIRED, on its ninth day, to twenty-three recipients. The next reply was an out-of-office.
  5. "We noticed you recently deleted a large number of files. Files are permanently removed 93 days after they're deleted." We have signed contracts with less runway than our own rubbish.
  6. "Hoping that this file will help you." An old contact, Friday evening, attaching a price list for a twenty-foot container of meat. We do not work in meat. It was the best email of the week.

So, for the record: the moat is gone. What is left to compete on is judgement, trust, and being in the room when it goes wrong.

(Clients, colleagues and numbers stripped out. The dysfunction is ours to share; theirs isn't.)