In early 2026 the technology industry is once again telling big confident stories about its own future. These stories dominate earnings calls conference stages and investor decks. They sound transformative urgent and inevitable. Yet when examined closely many of them rest on fragile foundations and selective evidence rather than operational reality.
The Skunkworks Collective – Martyn, Alba, Afi, Lila, and Coco
Madrid, Wednesday 14th January 2026
Right, listen. If you’ve ever sat through one of those AI conferences, you know the ones. Some bloke in a black polo neck stands on stage. He’s clearly never met a mirror he didn’t like. He says, “We’re on the cusp of AGI.” It sounds as if he’s just invented gravity. Then you’ll know the particular flavour of despair I’m talking about.
On Friday, the 9th of January 2026, Captain (Israeli Navy, Reserves) Doctor Azi Dagan posted a short video on the LinkedIn group IOSI: Counter-Terrorism and Geopolitical Security, accompanied by the text: The Iranian regime is slaughtering the protesters. To which I replied: It’s truly terrible, a foul crime. But what did you have to say about the slaughter of more than 20,000 innocent children? The reply to that was: We would say that it’s Hamas propaganda!
“Many on this platform still believe that they can tease Zionism away from Judaism. That’s not possible. It’s time for me to repost my previous explanation. And yes, if you use ‘Zionist’ as a slur, or rage against Zionists, you are indeed a Jew hater.”
This is a considered and measured response to that tweet and associated tweets.
The Data Warehouse Is Dead. Long Live the Data Warehouse.
In 1992, Bill Inmon coined the term “data warehouse” and laid out four sacred rules: subject-oriented, integrated, non-volatile, time-variant. It was a blueprint for a fortress of truth, expensive, on-premises, batch-processed, and utterly indispensable. Fast-forward three decades. The fortress has been replaced by something that resembles a hyperscale cloud platform. This platform can run your AI models and your CEO’s dashboard simultaneously. Welcome to data warehousing in 2025.
Hype and Misleading Claims Surrounding Data Lakehouses
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Segovia, 20th Devember 2025
A data lakehouse is marketed as a hybrid architecture. It combines the low-cost, flexible storage of data lakes. These lakes handle raw, unstructured data at scale. It also offers the structured querying, performance, and ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transactional capabilities of data warehouses. Vendors like Databricks coined the term. Snowflake and others promote it as a platform for analytics. It serves AI and machine learning needs. This approach eliminates data silos and reduces redundant copies. It enables cost-effective scaling through open standards and decoupled storage and compute models. However, much of this is hype driven by vendor marketing. Vendors promote it as an evolution from “data swamps” (unmanaged data lakes) and rigid warehouses.
President Donald Trump’s recent comments about NATO do not indicate a call for collective security reform. Instead, they reveal an intensely transactional view of international partnerships. Urging alliance members to assign as much as 5% of their GDP, an unprecedented figure, to purchasing U.S.-made weaponry and military equipment, Trump has once again reframed global security as a business deal.
Picture the scene. It’s Prime Minister’s Questions, the great gladiatorial stage of British democracy, less Gladiator and more Blazing Saddles at a town planning meeting in Swindon. Keir Starmer, sensible Labour’s hero, their knight in gleaming, sensible shoes, rises from the opposition bench. That look on his face, you know the one, shows a man who’s just alphabetised his law books and is ready to go. Across the gallery, Rishi Sunak sits there, gleaming, like a waxwork who’s been told he has to look “empathetic” by 5 p.m. or he’ll be back in the dock. Starmer adjusts his glasses and launches into one of his trademark cross-examinations. It’s like watching a lawyer interrogate a spreadsheet. “Point one, Mr Speaker!” He declares, and you can hear the ghost of Mel Brooks shouting, “What’s wrong with this guy? Where’s the dynamism?” He cites a statistic: a 17.3% increase in NHS waiting times, in case you’re wondering, and it isn’t. Then another: a £3.2 billion shortfall in council budgets. It’s meticulous, it’s legal, it’s as if he’s building a case to prosecute a toaster for breach of warranty. By the time he gets to his witty quip, “The failure of this government isn’t just a policy, it’s a personality trait!”, he drops like a Gregg’s custard tart allowed to fall by a woman worried about her cleaning bills.
I am a big fan of listening well and in continually improving listening skills. Yes, there are times when we can over-listen but this is also linked with skills of diplomacy and politics. How we listen should inform us a lot about what we and others really are.
So, whilst I am a big advocate of listening well I see that the world of business, and especially the sub-world of IT, is plagued with vain, impulsive and badly informed vote-takers who stubbornly resist the need to listen well and who will attempt to deftly fill the whole of the available time bashing their gums in communicating what are to all intents and purposes vacuous inanities and long litanies of meaningless clichés, full of terms that they either abuse or misunderstand; or even a bit of both.
And, as anyone who has worked with IT will know, I am not making this up. We used to call this charlatanry now we simply call it consulting. It still isn’t turning a pig’s ear into a silk purse, no matter how much people insist. But, there it is, in all its magnificent mediocrity.
Some people tell me it’s because IT attracts people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome; whatever that is.
I tend to put this refusal to listen down to other things; my money is firmly on arrogance and ignorance.
Bornheim, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany – 25th August 2017
When you offer people all of the benefits of the single market and the customs union, but without any of the EU bureaucracy, constraints and costs, what happens?
We ran an experimental consultation last year in the UK just to demonstrate what happens when bat-shit-crazy mad-cow Britain has a chance to throw a spanner in the works. Some people will inevitably believe the boloney whilst others will use it as a mere tool in a simple-minded and obtuse attempt to rationalise their own irrationality and misanthropy. Nobody can throw a spanner in the works quite like the Brits.
To paraphrase a famous quote, ‘Now is the time for all good MPs to come to the aid of the United Kingdom.’
Brexit is the enemy at the gate, the wolf at the door and the most significant threat to our collective future. This is our darkest hour of greatest need and Brexit must be stopped.
Hold this thought: Big Data is the future of online business and interactive advertising is its profit.
Much is being made of Big Data and its role in social media and online interactive advertising. The advertising industry itself has a “big crush” on Big Data, and it fuels the elevated revenues, profits and share prices of a number of online companies.
Hold this thought: ‘There are big lies, damn big lies and big data science’.
Statistics is a science. Some argue that it is the oldest of sciences. It can be traced back in history to the days of Augustus Caesar, and before.
In 1998, Lynn Billard wrote a paper that laid out the role of the Statistician and Statistics. She stated that “no science began until man mastered the concepts and arts of counting, measuring, and weighting”.[1]
It’s Friday morning in Canary Wharf, and I have been asked to facilitate a meeting of a chapel of IT Dogma Suckers and Digital Snake-oil Victims, the self-help recovery chain for people who have fallen victim to the pernicious and debilitating effects of IT dogma and professional rip-offs.(more…)
My original intention was not to write a book on the decline and fall of so many projects, but rather to pen a short essay, a sort of hard-hitting criticism of the litany of IT failures. Of course, this is rarely enough; it wasn’t enough because it identified the issues without provoking debate, and it highlighted common issues without providing guideline suggestions, which meant that it appeared upon reflection to come across as too much like a hi-tech hit and run exercise, beating up on IT failures without actually offering tangible solutions.
Far too few CEOs regularly think about IT on a habitual basis, and especially as something that is potentially integrated into everything their companies do and could do. This, however, is not at all surprising; there is a general lack of time for any CEO to be actively involved in what IT does, and they will generally have some degree of misunderstanding of both the historic roles and the relative successes and failures of IT.
From banking to airlines, through communications businesses to pharmaceutical companies, the IT landscape is littered with failures of Homeric proportions, lost opportunities and profligate waste. Across the spectrum of commercial enterprise, the IT bottom line is inevitably familiar: in general, businesses expose themselves to unnecessary levels of disruption, and spend far too much time and money on IT projects, IT products and internal IT services that frankly suck.
As a CEO, CIO, or student of Business Management, you will understand this. Information and Communication Technology (ICT, also known as IT) has become essential. It is crucial. It is a pervasive element in the fabric of corporate life. What I mean by ICT encompasses three essential elements: Processes, Information and Technology. ICT should be seen as an important corporate asset. More importantly, Information, Processes, and their Management (IM) should be considered as such. They should be made to work as contemporary business enablers. They should bring about value-adding alignment in business. Thus, they should be managed as such. Although it does work that way, it typically doesn’t.
Martyn Jones
Martyn Richard Jones
