They tell you your data is accessible. And technically, they’re not lying.
It’s accessible the way a treasure chest at the bottom of the ocean is accessible. Sure, it’s there. You just need a submarine, diving equipment, three specialists with conflicting certifications, and about six months to figure out where the hell they put it.
Welcome to the Big BM Friction Economy, where nothing quite works and everything almost does.
You know what Big BM stands for, right? Big Business Model. The massive enterprise software vendors who have turned incompatibility into an art form and friction into a profit center. They’ve figured out something brilliant:
Why sell you a solution when you can sell you a problem that requires seventeen other solutions?
The API Illusion
“We have an API,” they announce proudly, like they’ve just cured cancer.
Great. Fantastic.
Except that the API connects to last quarter’s data structure, not this quarter’s. It gives you customer names but not the associated transactions. It pulls reports, but not in a format anything else can read. It’s like selling you a key that opens a door to a room with another locked door. That key costs extra.
The API exists. This is technically true.
It’s also technically true that I exist on the same planet as Scarlett Johansson, but that fact hasn’t done me much good.
The Extraction Racket
Then there’s data extraction.
Sure, you can extract your data. You own it, after all. Legally. Philosophically. In every way except practically.
You can export it as a CSV with 847 columns, 600 of which are labeled things like field_misc_237 or legacy_val_temp_final_v2. You can extract it in XML so dense it would make a medieval monk weep. You can use their proprietary export tool, which costs more per month than your first car.
The data comes out looking like it went through a shredder, a blender, and a game of telephone played by people who don’t speak the same language.
Which, come to think of it, is exactly what happened.
Almost Enough Is the Business Model
Here’s the real genius of Big BM: Almost Enough. The system almost integrates with your other platforms. The dashboard almost shows you what you need. The export almost includes all the fields.
The automation almost works without manual intervention. Almost enough is the most profitable distance in enterprise software.
It’s far enough that you can’t quite make it work on your own.
But close enough that you think maybe—just maybe—if you buy one more module, hire one more consultant, attend one more certification training, you’ll finally get there.
You won’t.
Because the next version will change everything just enough that your workarounds stop working. The API will get “upgraded.” The data structure will be “optimized.” And you’ll be right back at almost enough.
Which is exactly where they want you.
The Consultancy Industrial Complex
Big BM loves consultants the way Vegas loves gamblers.
They’ve built systems so intentionally convoluted that an entire shadow industry exists just to translate their garbage into something resembling utility.
These aren’t bugs. This is the feature.
Why sell software once when you can sell software plus implementation, plus integration, plus ongoing support, plus emergency weekend fixes, plus the premium tier that unlocks the features that should have been included in the first place?
They’ve created a friction economy where the tax on actually using what you bought exceeds the cost of buying it.
Nice data you’ve got there. Shame if something happened to its usability.
The Colliding Business Models Problem
Here’s where it gets truly beautiful in its awfulness.
You’ve got:
The SaaS vendor who wants recurring revenue and doesn’t care if you can get your data out
The legacy enterprise giant still charging like it’s 1995 because enough people are locked in
The hot new startup that’ll definitely be around in five years (wink wink)
The platform play that wants to own your entire stack and makes everything else friction by design
They all have APIs. They all claim to play nice with others. And technically, they all connect to each other the way my high school French connects me to Proust.
Each has optimized for its own business model. None has optimized for you actually getting work done. That would require cooperation. And cooperation is terrible for quarterly earnings.
The Emperor’s Cloudy Clothes
We were told the cloud would solve this. Everything would talk to everything. Data would flow freely. Interoperability would be the default.
Instead, we got data lakes that are really data swamps, data warehouses that require a forklift certification to navigate, and data meshes about as organized as a plate of spaghetti thrown at a wall.
The cloud didn’t eliminate friction.
It just moved it somewhere you can’t even see the servers you’re not getting value from.
What’s the Solution?
I don’t have one.
I’m not a consultant. I don’t have a framework, a white paper, or a methodology with a trademark symbol next to it.
But I do know this:
As long as Big BM can profit more from your struggle than from your success, the friction stays not withstanding the promises of your current "Customer Success Manager" of the month.
As long as vendor lock-in beats interoperability in the boardroom, your data stays trapped.
As long as “almost enough” remains the most lucrative sweet spot in enterprise software, nothing fundamentally changes.
Your data is accessible.
Just not to you. Not really. Not in any way that matters. And that isn’t an accident.
The IT Contrarian - Because someone has to say it.