Creative/Generalist

Disclaimer: I wrote this article in 1997, whilst studying for an A-Level in Economics.  It was printed in the would-be-prestigious 'QE Economics and Business Review, Christmas 1997' Journal, of which, according to the inside of the bright yellow photocopied cover, I was deputy editor.  It appeared alongside other prescient articles like 'The Telecommunications Revolution - It's Changing our Lives' and 'The Best Thing to Kick Start and Economic Book - A War!'.  

I'm currently going through the process of finding and digitising old writing - mainly as a some sort of personal digital housekeeping exercise.  This article, though, is interesting enough to publish - not because of its content (which is fairly banal) but because of what it might reveal about certain threads connecting a version of me that existed 30 years to the person I am now.  I'll explore that, and related ideas, in an upcoming article, but you'll need this original piece for context.

So here it is, in all its teenage glory: The Economist's Couch.

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There’s a point on the AP-2 motorway in eastern Spain, somewhere between Zaragoza and Barcelona, where you cross the Greenwich meridian line.  I’ve driven over it a handful of times and it always catches me by surprise.  I guess it’s just not where you expect it to be - the curvature of the earth somehow warps your perception of space and distance in strange ways.  A sign unceremoniously announces the imaginary line 500 meters before you cross it and then you drive under a nondescript concrete arc, say “ooh, I didn’t realise that was there” and then get on with your journey and forget about it.

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AI reasoning models are now so good, especially with the introduction of ‘deep research’ type models that combine advanced reasoning with thorough content search capabilities, that they are generally my first port of call when tackling a complex, technical, open-ended question like “Should we pivot from product development to consulting services?” or “What business models could be built around such and such a website?”.  This is not to say that I blindly trust the output, just that rather than making even a cursory effort to sit down and process the big questions off the bat, perhaps with a notebook and pen in hand, I’ll ask AI first.

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This article is a summary of an idea/project I worked on throughout 2024.  It went through various forms - a Strava group, a website, and an unfinished eBook.  In the end I decided I didn't have time to maintain it, so here's some of the content I created boiled down to a summary, mainly so the concept doesn't just get lost to the passage of time.

You've stumbled across the strange and exciting world of Ultimate Rucking. Let's get you up to speed.

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Writing this at the start of 2025, I can say with a high degree of certainty that this piece is unlikely to age well, but at least we'll be able to look back and laugh about just how wrong we were.

Jumping right in - why might SaaS be 'dead'?

Death of the Backend

For context, let's restate Microsoft's Satya Nadella's December 2024 assertion that SaaS as we know it is dead:

I think the notion that business applications exist, that's probably where they'll all collapse right in the agent era, because if you think about it, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic. The business logic is all going to these agents and these agents are going to be multi-repo CRUD right, so they're not going to discriminate between what the backend is - they're going to update multiple databases and all the logic will be in the AI tier so to speak. And once the AI tier becomes the place where all the logic is, then people will start replacing the backends.

It's fair to say this interview sent shockwaves through the industry - not because it was the first time anyone had floated the idea that SaaS was moribund, but perhaps because it was such a concrete formulation of how it was going to happen coming from a senior industry player. But combing through the comments on YouTube, reaction videos and subsequent blog posts, it was clear just how polarised opinion was on how this might play out. A lot of experienced engineers refused to countenance the possibility that backend logic could be subsumed by LLMs, exemplified by comments like this:

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