If there are three to five large players in a highly regulated market, and one is seen as the technology leader, it is often because that organisation has already invested in replacing their technology foundations with boring technology. We can see this across industries, including the energy, telecommunications, hospital, and financial services industries, as well as for government services.

Having boring technology foundations allows the organisation to more easily build new things such as software, software and software as a service applications, and even Large Language Model (LLM) applications, using their existing systems and data. These organisations don’t have to start all their technology projects from scratch or, even worse, try to build a seaweed of tangled technology on top of their existing decades-old technology foundations.

Which technology is boring technology? It’s an educated guess.

Boring technology is software and systems that are likely to keep working for decades. When we build or buy technology systems, all we can do is to take an educated guess as to whether the technology that we build on will be backwards compatible (i.e. will not break our existing systems), will not disappear, and will only change in a way that gives us plenty of time to update our existing systems.

For example, we can make educated guesses about what technology is boring, and will stay boring for at least a decade, by considering the following:

(a) Do lots of people use the technology? The greater number of companies that use the technology, the less likely it will be that the technology will disappear overnight. If many companies use the technology, then those companies will be willing to pay vendors and third-party service providers to continue supporting and maintaining the technology.

(b) Is the technology open source, commodified, or does it at least use open data standards? Any technology which is controlled by a single company can be a risk. Whether it is a software vendor that does not release its source code, or a software as a service provider that locks you into their platform in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to extract your data.

(c) Do the developers of the technology respect existing users when they change the technology? Microsoft (Windows) and Apple (macOS), for example, have a long history of going out of their way to try to ensure that software that runs on old versions of their operating systems continues to run on the latest versions of their operating systems.

What are some examples of boring technology?

It is becoming increasingly rare for large organisations to build their software from scratch. For example, building your own enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management platform, or core financial management platform, from scratch rarely makes sense. Instead, organisations seen as technology leaders often pay for an industry-specific, relatively boring, third-party “core platform” and then use, build, and innovate, using that platform.

At a low level, commentators also consider technologies such as Linux distributions, Postgres databases, the Go programming language, and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) protocol, to be boring.

All of these low-level technologies are widely used and are either open source (Postgres and Go) and/or are provided by multiple vendors allowing users to easily move from one vendor to another (Linux and S3).

A personal anecdote (I just had to update my boring technology after 7 to 10 years … and I’m OK with it)

I have been thinking about this during the last few weeks because I recently spent a bit of time doing technology work to effectively stay in place. I needed to move:

from version 1 to version 2 of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) s3 Go system development kit library https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/announcing-end-of-support-for-aws-sdk-for-go-v1-on-july-31-2025/; and from version 1 to version 2 of the 1Password command line interface https://app-updates.agilebits.com/product_history/CLI.

Why was I OK with this? Version 1 of the Amazon S3 SDK library was supported for about 10 years, and version 1 of the 1Password command line interface was supported for about 7 years. Both also have excellent migration guides making updating the code from version 1 to version 2 relatively simple and not particularly time consuming.

I won’t say it was a joy, but it was relatively painless.

Who remembers Y2K? That was a boring technology problem.

If, like me, you are old enough to remember Y2K, you will recall that Y2K happened because people who built software in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s did not expect that their software would be used for 10, 20, or 30 years (i.e. into the 2000s).

It is a technology cliche that any software that you throw together quickly to fix a problem in a hacky way is bound to stick around. Effectively forever.

It is inevitable that the technology infrastructure that we build on will change out from under us

Similarly, it is quite a shock for software engineers the first time that they build a technology system, and the underlying libraries, databases, operating systems, or other technology, used to run the system suddenly causes their software to break because the underlying technology changes dramatically or disappears completely.

The vendor stops developing the technology. Or the operating system provider creates a whole new operating system that is incompatible with the software engineer’s software, and all of the software engineer’s company’s users move to the new operating system.

When software engineers praise boring technology, this is what they are talking about. Even though we know that there is no stopping technology from changing over time, nor would we want it to.

And only having to make simple changes to existing systems once every 7 to 10 years?

For me, that is as good as it gets.