Yes, the 4-armies analogy was a remarkable non-sequitur. I can't help but think he introduced it to talk about the hidden perils of "standard solutions" and "vendor lock-in", but then abandoned this idea when his conclusive paragraph brags about solving a problem with AWS Aurora (a cloud RDMS) and AWS DynamoDB (a cloud mongo-ish).

This trade-off between (apparent) simplicity and vendor lock-in is a fundamental force in the industry, and is worth talking more plainly about. (Another big area where this affects people is authentication - it's easier (for users) to use Google- and Facebook-backed OAuth, but what are the trade-offs involved? Does this increase my vulnerability in any way?)

I liked the idea behind this article, but it's definitely a missed opportunity. And yeah, as something of a web-minimalist myself the ridiculous page-weight was a rather ironic touch.

Bit of a shame as Intercom has been doing Content Marketing right for a long time. Older stuff by Des Traynor was pretty good though (and entertaining, his talks about Product Strategy are hilarious). Might have switched to a staff writer, hence the genericism (i hope they don't let engineering write articles on their own).

I guess that is the peril of content marketing in a narrow field - eventually you run out of fresh takes but still need to attract eyeballs. Hence the Buzzfeed-style headlines.

Initially Intercom was all about being great in a niche (on-site chat messaging), doing one thing well, focusing. Then growth came, demands for expansion, and so their mantra switched to all-in-one suites. So did their content marketing.

Hi! I’m Rich, the blog post author.

Thanks for the candid feedback :-)

This blog post is somewhat a written summarization of a 25 -> 30 minute conference tech talk that I gave at SRECON-EU last year. It was a real struggle to figure out what to leave in and what to leave out. I didn’t want to arrive at a blog post that takes 30 mins to read :-) So, I can see how the four armies and battlefield analogy might come across as disjointed or unnecessary. There is definitely some context missing from the blog post that was in the talk.

When I was putting together the original talk, the “four armies and battlefield” framing was something I felt was useful to help illustrate how competitive I feel the modern software business landscape is and thus how important it is that your company has the right engineering strategy to help them “win their own battle” / succeed in your chosen market.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback, hopefully the above provides a little more insight on why I used the four armies framing.

Rich.

exactly what I felt, 'run less software' page seems is 'running a huge chunk of stuff' itself, how ironic, not to mention it's tediously lengthy, gosh.

1.6MB for one image of a map, that alone is a huge factor in the size. Unfortunately it's the state of many websites.

If all that bloat is generated because they are using third party frameworks or plugins and all they really are doing is writing the copy of the post itself then it still basically fits with the narrative.

I think it was one of the most nice-looking blog posts I've seen in a while.

Yes, I know - wrong medium for presentation over content.

Exactly