Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable—at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability.

The market rewards short-term profit-maximizing systems, and doesn’t sufficiently penalize such companies for the impact their mistakes can have. (Stock prices depress only temporarily. Regulatory penalties are minor. Class-action lawsuits settle. Insurance blunts financial losses.) It’s not even clear that the information technology industry could exist in its current form if it had to take into account all the risks such brittleness causes.

The asymmetry of costs is largely due to our complex interdependency on so many systems and technologies, any one of which can cause major failures. Each piece of software depends on dozens of others, typically written by other engineering teams sometimes years earlier on the other side of the planet. Some software systems have not been properly designed to contain the damage caused by a bug or a hack of some key software dependency.

This market force has led to the current global interdependence of systems, far and wide beyond their industry and original scope. It’s why flying planes depends on software that has nothing to do with the avionics. It’s why, in our connected internet-of-things world, we can imagine a similar bad software update resulting in our cars not starting one morning or our refrigerators failing.

Right now, the market incentives in tech are to focus on how things succeed: A company like CrowdStrike provides a key service that checks off required functionality on a compliance checklist, which makes it all about the features that they will deliver when everything is working. That’s exactly backward. We want our technological infrastructure to mimic nature in the way things fail. That will give us deep complexity rather than just surface complexity, and resilience rather than brittleness.

Netflix is famous for its Chaos Monkey tool, which intentionally causes failures to force the systems (and, really, the engineers) to be more resilient. The incentives don’t line up in the short term: It makes it harder for Netflix engineers to do their jobs and more expensive for them to run their systems. Over years, this kind of testing generates more stable systems. But it requires corporate leadership with foresight and a willingness to spend in the short term for possible long-term benefits.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crashes cars to learn what happens to the people inside. But cars are relatively simple, and keeping people safe is straightforward. Software is different. It is diverse, is constantly changing, and has to continually adapt to novel circumstances. We can’t expect that a regulation that mandates a specific list of software crash tests would suffice. Again, security and resilience are achieved through the process by which we fail and fix, not through any specific checklist. Regulation has to codify that process.

As a SaaS startup scales, sales and customer support staff pay for themselves, and the marginal cost to serve your one-thousandth versus one-millionth user is near-zero. The result? Some SaaS companies achieve gross profit margins of 75 to 90 percent, rivaling Windows in its monopolistic heyday.

Rent-seeking has become an explicit playbook for many shameless SaaS investors. Private equity shop Thoma Bravo has acquired over four hundred software companies, repeatedly mashing products together to amplify lock-in effects so it can slash costs and boost prices—before selling the ravaged Franken-platform to the highest bidder.

In the Kafkaesque realm of health care, software giant Epic’s 1990s-era UI is still widely used for electronic medical records, a nuisance that arguably puts millions of lives at risk, even as it accrues billions in annual revenue and actively resists system interoperability. SAP, the antiquated granddaddy of enterprise resource planning software, has endured for decades within frustrated finance and supply chain teams, even as thousands of SaaS startups try to chip away at its dominance. Salesforce continues to grow at a rapid clip, despite a clunky UI that users say is “absolutely terrible” and “stuck in the 80s”—hence, the hundreds of “SalesTech” startups that simplify a single platform workflow (and pray for a billion-dollar acquihire to Benioff’s mothership). What these SaaS overlords might laud as an ecosystem of startup innovation is actually a reflection of their own technical shortcomings and bloated inertia.

Over 1,500 software startups are focused on billing and invoicing alone. The glut of tools extends to sectors without any clear need for complex software: no fewer than 378 hair salon platforms, 166 parking management solutions, and 70 operating systems for funeral homes and cemeteries are currently on the market. Billions of public pension and university endowment dollars are being burned on what amounts to hackathon curiosities, driven by the machinations of venture capital and private equity. To visit a much-hyped “demo day” at a startup incubator like Y Combinator or Techstars is to enter a realm akin to a high-end art fair—except the objects being admired are not texts or sculptures or paintings but slightly nicer faces for the drudgery of corporate productivity.

As popular as SaaS has become, much of the modern economy still runs on the humble, unfashionable spreadsheet. For all its downsides, there are virtues. Spreadsheets are highly interoperable between firms, partly because of another monopoly (Excel) but also because the generic .csv format is recognized by countless applications. They offer greater autonomy and flexibility, with tabular cells and formulas that can be shaped into workflows, processes, calculators, databases, dashboards, calendars, to-do lists, bug trackers, accounting workbooks—the list goes on. Spreadsheets are arguably the most popular programming language on Earth.