Corporate software is rarely "broken" in a dramatic way. It's usually functional enough to ship the quarter-yet somehow exhausting enough to drain momentum day after day. Permissions don't match reality. Dashboards replace judgment. Approvals multiply. Tools meant to simplify work become an extra layer of work. And teams quietly adapt with rituals, workarounds, and shadow processes that keep things moving while paying an invisible tax in attention.
The Year of Corporate Software is a sharp, human tour through that tax-the everyday friction created by modern enterprise tooling and the systems wrapped around it. This isn't a vendor pitch or a rage-filled teardown. It's a clear-eyed look at how good intentions become bureaucracy, how incentives distort behavior, and how "standardization" can slide into control. Along the way, it explores the real-world mechanics of how organizations buy, roll out, govern, and live inside software: ticketing systems, identity and access management, procurement workflows, collaboration platforms, internal apps, data pipelines, and the metrics that claim to measure progress.
Written for leaders, builders, and anyone who has to operate inside these systems, the book connects the day-to-day annoyances to the deeper causes: misaligned incentives, risk avoidance, unclear ownership, and the false comfort of process as a substitute for trust. It shows why tool sprawl happens even when everyone says they hate it, why "temporary" integrations become permanent, and how local optimizations create global drag. Most importantly, it offers practical ways to reduce the tool-tax: how to simplify workflows, design guardrails that don't suffocate, improve decision rights, and rebuild a culture where software serves the work-not the other way around.
If you've ever wondered whether it's just you-or whether the whole machine is quietly running on friction-The Year of Corporate Software will feel uncomfortably familiar. And if you're responsible for making that machine run, it will give you a better way to see the problem, talk about it, and start fixing it.
