Is this the end of CRUD business apps?

CEOs have spent a decade predicting the end of hand-written businesses software. Are they finally right?

It’s a poorly kept secret that business developers are often paid to solve the same problems over and over again. This is particularly true for the programmers that work with small and medium-sized businesses that aren’t part of the tech industry. These businesses aren’t selling shiny new silicon gadgets. They just need software that understands their day-to-day business and automates its processes, quirks and all.

Once upon a time, you could make a decent living creating line-of-business apps for companies like these. More often than not, the apps were glorified database wrappers. The plumbing was straightforward — all you needed was logic to display records, aggregate data in some visually pleasing way, and make updates on demand. Whether the database operations corresponded to adding new customers, managing a product catalog, tracking orders, or some other business process didn’t really matter, so long as the developer understood their client’s needs and could make the software look nice, run reliably, and integrate into the existing organizational flow. Developers took to calling these apps CRUD (create, read, update, delete), an acronym that had just a twinge of disrespect.