When a vendor goes down and what it teaches

What we're tracking

• •The cost of leaning on a single vendor Most businesses carry what is called concentration risk without naming it. One product sits underneath a core workflow, everything else connects to it, and the day it fails is the day you discover how much you had resting on it. The risk is not that the tool is poor. Good tools fail too. The risk is that you have no second path when it does.
• •What to actually check before you commit When you evaluate a tool, outage behaviour is a line item, not an afterthought. A few questions do most of the work:
• •Reading the week's market signals The stability of a vendor is not only about uptime. It is also about who owns it, how it is funded, and whether its strategy is about to change under you. These things rarely show up in a feature comparison, but they shape the tool you will be using in two years.
• •The habit of shifting your own perspective The third item is lighter, and I include it because the idea underneath it is worth borrowing. GitHub's annual game jam returned with a single-word brief: "This November, make a game inspired by the theme SHIFT." [3] The prompt is aimed at game developers, but the instinct it rewards is one every business could use more of. A shift is a deliberate change of footing, taken before you are forced into one.
• •What ties the day together An outage, a market round-up and a game jam do not obviously belong in the same briefing. What joins them is a single discipline: do not treat your tools as settled. Know what fails when they fail, watch what is happening to the companies behind them, and make a habit of questioning the setup before it questions you. If you want a fuller view of where the line between human judgement and automated action should sit, start with what AI should and should not do in your business, and see yesterday's notes in the