Sunday · 11:43 p.m.
The phone
rang.
Rain on the glass. One lamp. I let it ring twice so it would know who was in charge.
Case no. 009 · The Sunday Night File
It was a crime of passion.
They always are, when the victim had it coming.
Scroll to open the file
The phone
A woman’s voice. Steady. The kind of steady people get after they’ve stopped shaking.
Her“Something’s happened to our CMS.”
Me“Is it dead?”
Her“I don’t know what it is anymore. You’d better come.”
12:31 a.m. · Downtown
The city did what it does in the rain, which is look guilty.
Fourteenth floor.
Marketing.
Every light on. Everybody gone but her.
Move your light.
The printer was still going when I walked in, feeding a ribbon of paper across the floor. Invoices. Renewal notices. A chair on its side.
Two filing drawers hanging open like jaws. And on the screen, a question.
Delete this workspace?
This will permanently delete all content, users, and settings. This action cannot be undone.
CancelDelete
Somebody had been sure.
Exhibit A · The victim
The
victim.
I’d seen it around town. Eleven years old. Enterprise license. Everyone called it the single source of truth, the way you’d call a landlord the single source of rent.
A bill that got longer every year, like a shadow after four o’clock.
- Subject
- Content management system, enterprise edition
- Age
- 11 years
- Known as
- “The single source of truth”
- Plug-ins
- 47 (3 still maintained)
- Environments
- 9
- Theme
- Custom. Do not touch.
- Renewal
- Up 40% this year
- Cause of death
- Deletion. Deliberate.
It didn’t have enemies.
It had users.
12:58 a.m. · Statement of the witness
She talked.
I let her.
The campaign went live Monday at eight. She needed three things.
A new headline
Developer requiredLives in a global component. Ticket. Sprint. Two weeks.
A new image
Upgrade requiredThe media library didn’t know the size. Plug-in. License. Invoice.
A form
Not on your tierEnterprise Forms. Available on the new plan.
An update to your pricing
We’re updating our pricing to better reflect the value we deliver.
$48,000Effective Monday.
Her only developer was asleep in Lisbon.
1:12 a.m. · Entered into evidence
“So I
deleted it.”
She didn’t blink. Not the website. Not the campaign. Not one word of her own copy. Just the thing standing between her and all of it.
“I don’t need a new website. I needed this one to stop fighting me.”
The board
I worked it the way you work anything. Pull a string. See what moves.
Exhibit A
The victim
Lock-in
Years of content in a shape only one company could read.
Brittleness
An update took the homepage down in March. Nobody knew which of the forty-seven did it.
Dependency
Every change with a developer’s name on it. Every developer with a queue.
The gates
Features she’d already paid for, moved behind a door with a new price on it.
Every string I pulled led back to the body.
2:40 a.m. · The car
Here’s my problem. I find who did it. I say why. I put the world back the way it was.
Except the way it was, was the crime.
I’ve put people away for less. I have never once met a victim that had it coming.
You don’t get to kill something because it’s expensive. That’s what I kept telling myself.
Then I’d remember. She didn’t kill something. She cancelled a subscription. The content was hers. It had always been hers.
The site was still up. Fast. Static. Unbothered by any of this.
The only thing dead
was the middleman.
Case no. 009 · Disposition
Justified
No charges. No suspect. A woman, a deadline, and a system that had spent eleven years making sure she needed it.
Monday · 7:52 a.m.
She published
the page.
She described it. Keep the header. Keep the voice. Use the proof points from the brief. Put the form at the bottom. A preview came back. Then a receipt.
Nobody called a developer. Nobody called anybody.
- The brand stayed locked.
- The words stayed hers.
- Every change left a receipt.
Epilogue
I keep the file on my desk. Not as a warning to marketers.
As a warning to the rest of us, the next time someone slides a contract across the table and calls it a content management system.
Think
twice.
Ask what it manages. Ask who it’s managing.
Maybe you
don’t need one
at all.
Delete your CMS?
This will permanently remove the vendor lock-in, the plug-in roulette, the developer queue, and the renewal notice. This action cannot be undone. Good.