Outside the Walls

Outside the Walls

Reflections 2nd November

A kaleidoscope of perspectives.

Richard Merrick's avatar
Richard Merrick
Nov 02, 2025
∙ Paid

There is a point where tech assists in running a business to become a liability when we increase our dependence on it. I think it can be difficult to spot that point when we’re busy chasing goals. There are so many different perspectives.

Two things during the week caught my attention:

AWS

Two conflicting perspectives on AWS arose in a conversation during the week, and are sitting with me. The first - my own - was that it represented a demonstration of the danger of creating ‘single points of failure” in critical supply chains owned by private companies that could leverage that dependency.

The other, that an organisation carrying a third of the world’s internet commerce could suffer a major failure and be back up and running in twelve hours, is remarkable and that the capability relied on the very economics of scale that worried me.

The best way I know to resolve paradoxes is through conversations in small, trusted groups where you can argue the point and not the person. To argue from t…

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