There’s a non-trivial element behind all of this class of software, which is that humans are gonna human. Whether that’s a constant cat and mouse game in which your X number of employees are fodder who will inevitably click the wrong thing at the wrong time, or a zero-day laden worm that might be stoppable with enough eyeballs and some manner of heuristics that can automatically roll out some countermeasure.

Here on HN we generally understand technology well enough that most of us probably don’t need all these safeguards. James in accounting absolutely does, though.

There are a lot of “James in accounting”s out there, and a lot of them run or manage the companies that make the line of business software that everyone else relies on.

I’ve been studying the news coverage outside the tech sphere and the way people talk about this outage betrays exactly why software like this exists in the first place.