Same fad, new logo

Technology fads rarely die. They rebrand. CORBA's distributed objects became SOAP's contracts, SOA's buses, microservices' bounded contexts, serverless's functions, and now "event-driven AI platforms" that still need someone to reconcile two databases when finance closes the month. The vocabulary rotates; the underlying mistake — buying topology instead of ownership — persists.

Enterprise history is a palimpsest of the same slide. ESB hubs promised loose coupling and became single points of failure. Kubernetes promised portable ops and became YAML archipelagos owned by a platform team that gates every change. Blockchain promised trustless workflows and rediscovered why auditors liked signed rows in SQL. Each wave had a real insight; each wave was oversold as universal.

Vendor economics require novelty. Consultancies bill migrations; cloud vendors bill consumption; framework authors bill training. Stability is bad for keynote narratives. Your CRUD app does not need a new architecture every half-decade — but an industry built on releases does, and it will find a reason: mobile, cloud, data mesh, AI.

Recognizing rhyme saves money. When the pitch is "independent teams" without team redesign, hear SOA. When the pitch is "rewrite to modernize" without strangler plans, hear Digg v4 and Lidl SAP. When the pitch is "citizen developers" or "AI engineers," hear low-code with a chat box. The logo changes; ask who owns prod at 2 a.m.

Mutated successes exist inside the noise. Containers really improved packaging. REST really beat WS-* for most public APIs. TypeScript really helped large frontends. Mutation is not fraud — it is adoption with scar tissue. Fads fail when mutation is skipped and replacement is declared.

Fashion-conscious engineers feel this as fatigue; CFOs feel it as CapEx cycles that never quite reduce run costs. The org that wins is not anti-technology — it is anti-silver-bullet. It extracts real improvements without freezing revenue on greenfield ego projects.

Fadstack exists because naming the rhyme is half the defense. When someone says "this time is different because AI," ask what happens to edge cases, tests, and ownership — the same questions that killed the last five logos. Usually the honest answer is: same fad, new logo. Plan accordingly.