Don’t underestimate the tech that makes your eyes glaze over

Products for cubicle dwellers may not be the whiz-bang miracles that we imagine from Silicon Valley, but the world runs on boring technology that boring organisations need in order to do boring but important things. Many of the companies that sell this technology make rivers of cash, even if only five humans are capable of explaining what, for example, the software giant SAP makes.

I don’t know what technology my employer uses to process my paychecks. Most of us will never see the Amazon computer servers that fire Netflix to our TVs. The U.S. health care system largely relies on patient records from a software company called Epic. You might not know what Oracle is, but you have probably indirectly interacted with one of its databases if you have bought anything online. We’ll never write a valentine to that kind of boring software, but we need it to function. The dull stuff can also make what we do better, like enable telemedicine calls or help us check whether diapers are in stock before we drive to the store.

A lot of technology designed for businesses stinks or is stuck in the past, but it’s the nuts and bolts of everything. Companies that make dull technology for organisations will probably last longer than the dozens of Doritos-on-demand start-ups. And it’s a gold mine. Businesses and governments are expected to spend about $4.5 trillion on technology this year. Some of the world’s most valuable technology companies, like Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and ServiceNow, are boring.

Boring isn’t just lucrative. It can also be a political asset. Facebook can’t buy a pack of chewing gum without government regulators suspecting that the company is plotting to cause global tooth decay. And when it tries to buy any company, every antitrust alarm bell goes off. Yet in January, Microsoft announced a nearly $70 billion acquisition of the video game titan Activision Blizzard.

Regulators could still block the takeover, but Microsoft can try partly because of its identity as the least contentious of the tech superpowers. Microsoft has more revenue and is worth far more than Facebook’s parent company, Meta. But it mostly makes products businesses use to do things like crunch data and not, say, communication tools that have been abused to spread conspiracy theories.

Mark Gorenberg has devoted his professional life to snooze technology. In the late 1980s, he worked at Sun Microsystems, whose technology like Unix and Java lingers on in nearly every single piece of current technology. Gorenberg described Sun as “very boring but it powered everything.” Since then, Gorenberg has worked for investment firms that specialise in backing young companies that sell basically unglamorous technology to businesses. He told me that many of the so-called enterprise tech companies have not been the most cutting-edge. But he is betting that the dull sector will become a hotbed of exciting inventions.

Gorenberg is talking about innovations like the technology Microsoft recently released that essentially helps software write itself. His investment firm, Zetta Venture Partners, backs a start-up that scans records of car crashes to conduct insurance claims assessments and another that spots potential network failures before they take down the internet. He’s talking about a future where boring technology remains essential but has a bit of the wow, too. If this technology can be a little exciting and also help all of us, great. But there will always be a bedrock of boring tech that touches our lives and the world — even if we never know that it exists.