It is the ecosystem around it — the sixty-person machine shop, the twelve-person electronics assembler, the family-run processor upgrading a packaging line. Babb builds the tools that ecosystems run on, and reports from inside them. Four layers, twelve products, one commitment: outlast the platform cycle you were made in.
Standards constrain protocols. Protocols carry tools. Tools run on systems.
In the 1800s, manufacturers moved from belt-drive systems to dispersed motors that powered individual parts of the line. The equivalent now is putting computation where the work happens. Most enterprise software fails at exactly this: it serves what already exists and chains a business to its past, no differently than the machines it replaced.
Every producer will need to integrate computational intelligence within the decade. Most cannot do it alone, cannot afford the consultants who serve the Fortune 500, and will be sold packages that lock them into vendor dependency. We build the alternative: open specifications, self-hostable nodes, open export, nothing held hostage.
A tool that cannot survive a decade of intermittent connectivity, a hardware revision, or a change of ownership was never infrastructure. We publish the durability standards we hold ourselves to, and the assessors that test against them, so the claim can be checked rather than believed.
We are not a technology company that went looking for problems. We are reporters and builders who found that the tools their subjects needed did not exist.
Babb reports from the working world — feed lots, steel mills, branch offices, job sites and launch pads. The same field that shapes the coverage shapes the software.