Do you really need enterprise?

Last week we talked about bespoke software and whether it has to be out of reach for smaller businesses. This week we pick up the thread we deliberately put a pin in: what even is enterprise — and do you actually need it?

Spoiler: probably not as much of it as you’ve been quoted for.

The conversation kicks off with a real one Matt had recently — someone pushing back on Azure with “Facebook runs on PHP and MySQL, so why can’t we?” It’s a fair question with an uncomfortable answer: Facebook doesn’t run MySQL, it runs Facebook’s MySQL, maintained by tens of thousands of engineers. You don’t have that. The $30–$100/month floor on Azure isn’t a tax — it’s a team of Microsoft engineers doing the boring infrastructure work you’d otherwise have to do yourself.

From there we get into the meat of it:

• What “enterprise” actually means — and why our working definition is internal systems for larger organisations, even though that definition leaks the moment you poke it
• Why the reference architectures Microsoft published for SMBs in the 2000s never matched the businesses we were actually working with
• The all-nines availability trap — and the difference in cost, effort, and engineering maturity between 99.9% and 99.999%
• The CIA triad: why availability is negotiable, but confidentiality and integrity shouldn’t be — even for the smallest shop
• Surface area vs. blast radius — two lenses for thinking about risk that don’t require enterprise budgets to apply
• Why “the server under John’s desk” can genuinely be a more secure option than a half-baked cloud deployment
• How enterprise-level engineering costs get baked into bespoke software quotes — even when the customer doesn’t need them
• The squeaky-wheel CEO problem: how a single bad experience at the wrong moment triggers a million-dollar re-architecture for a system that was working fine
• Why “nobody gives a f#ck about your code” still applies — end users don’t care if it’s enterprise ready, they care that it works when they need it
• And the AI angle: if a developer’s answer to “can you get me this Excel report?” is “sure, that’ll be an n-tier architecture and six months,” Claude is going to eat that work for breakfast

The point we keep landing on: there are a lot of dials you can turn on a software solution — scale, uptime, redundancy, perimeter security, geographic availability — and every one of them costs money. Enterprise customers turn them all to 11 because they need to. Smaller businesses don’t, and the job of a good consultant is to ask which dials actually matter for this customer, this problem.

If you’ve ever looked at a quote for bespoke software and thought “there’s no way that’s worth it” — there’s a decent chance a big chunk of that number was for things you don’t need.

We close the loop on last week and tee up the next question: what changes when the software is consumer-facing? That’s a different conversation. Tune in next time.

Matt – Oakvale Shiraz 🍷 Liam – Glandore TPR Tempranillo (Hilltops) 🍷

Both wineries are in the Hunter Valley. We should probably get back up there.

• Last episode: The Bespoke Software Myth
• The callback we made: Nobody Gits a Fork About Your Code
• Matt’s upcoming talk at /NEW conf — “Everything is Too Hard” (Thursday, just after lunch)

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Cheers! 🍻