During the dotcom boom, ERP customers wanted Internet-enabled Manufacturing Resource Planning.
Now, MRP was a very resource-intensive workload and took several hours to run on an enterprise network. Not surprisingly, it’d rarely end when it was attempted over a 64 Kbps dialup modem in the late 1990s.
However, we’d have lost the market if we hadn’t delivered the much desired eMRP module.
As somebody said, “Anything can happen when the music stops, but as long as it’s playing, you gotta get up and dance!”
In my blog post entitled Aspirational Selling Is Not Overselling, I’d cited the Second Law of Software Marketing:
Don’t let the product come in the way of the story.
(see footnote 1)
At the time, I didn’t know if there was any First Law of Software Marketing.
Now I do.
If you promise 100 features to a customer who has only one, then, even if you deliver only two features, she will forget that you had promised 100.
(H/T @DoctorLFC.)
Let me take the opportunity to slip in a few more laws of software marketing:
Third Law of Software Marketing:
Sell them the moon. Make ’em settle for the good enough.
Fourth Law of Software Marketing:
Qualify your leads by networth, not IQ – intellectuals seldom pay much.
Fifth Law of Software Marketing:
Sell AI-driven personalization, market-for-one, etc. When customers ask for a personalized feature, lump all customers into a market-for-everyone and tell them very few customers need this feature and ask them to use workarounds.
H/T Nikita Bier, CPO of X fka Twitter, for this law.
People with >10 drafts:
0.00072% of DAU
This would be the worst engineering-to-impact ratio in the known universe.
Better thing I’d like to solve:
why aren’t you just posting those drafts when inspiration strikes?
— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) January 1, 2026
Sixth Law of Software Marketing:
When your house is on fire, you don’t look at the brand of the fire extinguisher.
I must thank Druva for this law. This Pune-based data security startup was trying to break into NASA for years to sell its backup software. But in vein probably because Druva was an unknown brand at the time. Then, one day, NASA suffered a data breach. It reached out to Druva the very next day to place an order for its backup software. Talking about this deal, one of the cofounders of Druva quipped to Economic Times: “When there is a fire you don’t ask for the brand of the extinguisher”.
I’d ended the aforementioned blog post with the following observation:
Being able to find the right balance is the key for techies to create a satisfied customer. Not whining about overselling.
I’m happy to inform that, five years later, techies have stopped whining and have made huge strides in finding the right balance! For example:
Percentage of companies that rated their ERP project a success:
– 2015: 58%
– 2019: 88%.
Key reason for sharp increase: To avoid reputational damage coming from failure, companies redefine success as “whatever they get.”
Effectively, customers redefined the success criteria for their ERP implementations ex post facto. No prizes for guessing why!
Kudos to program managers, project managers, business analysts and other ERP implementation personnel for driving this change in consumer behavior.
We’re now hearing that companies have started redefining Artificial General Intelligence similarly:
“I’ve seen businesses redefine AGI at a lower bar to make it easier to hit” ~ @AndrewYNg.
Props once again to techies, this time the ones in AI labs and AI professional services organizations.
While on this topic, the only definitive definition of AGI I’ve heard so far is the one provided by Elon Musk in his interview with Larry Fink, CEO, BlackRock, at the recently concluded WEF in Davos:
“AI that’s smarter than any human.” ~ @ElonMusk.
Previous definitions of AGI hemmed and hawed around “most tasks”, “most humans”, etc. I thought they were too fuzzy since humans have a wide range of knowledge and IQ, and it’s untenable to claim that AI has beaten humans without defining the knowledge and IQ level of the benchmark human. When I heard those definitions, I jumped to the conclusion that Generative AI practitioners were using AGI as a decoy to divert the spotlight from the legal issues facing the industry like copyright violations, and hitch regulation to a moving target like AGI, so that genAI gets a long enough runway and becomes “Too Big To Be Regulated”.
By emphasizing “any human”, Elon makes the definition of AGI crystal clear.
In Davos, he also predicted that AGI will be achieved by the end of this year.
“Whether you consider Elon Musk a visionary or a liar, he has a long record of setting aggressive deadlines that his companies don’t meet” ~ @theo_wayt.
Many fake it till they make it.
Some fake it even after they make it.
They’re not the same. pic.twitter.com/JWA5pdD0fE— SKR (@s_ketharaman) January 15, 2026
It’s another story how that prediction ages.
If you’ve come this far, thanks for tolerating my lame attempt at satire!
FOOTNOTE(S):
- I recently learned that there’s an equivalent law in journalism: “Don’t let facts come in the way of an interesting story”.
