Abraham Maslow wrote that line in 1966, and people have been quoting it ever since to describe a very human bias: when you own one tool, you start framing every problem as the one your tool can solve. It feels efficient. It is also, very often, wrong.
Here is the uncomfortable part. That sentence does not only describe a cognitive quirk - it describes a large slice of the IT services industry. An agency that lives and breathes Magento will propose Magento for your content-led brand site. A TYPO3 shop finds a TYPO3-shaped answer to your commerce problem. A WordPress studio reaches for another plugin. The platform was chosen long before your project existed, and your project simply gets bent to fit it.
We can say all this with some confidence, because (many) years ago, we were that agency.
The Day Our Favourite Tool Stopped Fitting
Our hammer was OpenText TeamSite. For a long stretch it was our default answer to almost everything, and for a while that worked perfectly well. Then the rest of the market began to modernise, and TeamSite did not. Innovation slowed to a crawl. We watched newer, lighter, more open platforms overtake it on one front after another - and we kept reaching for the same tool anyway, because it was the one we knew best.
So we did what engineers do: we built our way around the gaps. We created our own modern framework on top of the platform, a blueprint that gave our clients the experience the product itself could no longer deliver. It was good work. It even worked. But it never touched the real problem, which was simply this: the platform was ageing, and the vendor was not investing enough to change that.
And that is when the hard truth landed. As a partner, we should not have been the ones modernising an expensive platform. That is the vendor's job. We were quietly subsidising someone else's stagnation with our own time and ingenuity, and calling it a partnership.
So we made an uncomfortable decision. We ended the partnership and rebuilt the company around a different idea. We lost a familiar platform that day. What we gained has been worth far more: a way of choosing technology that has served us, and our clients, ever since.
The Lesson Was Not “That Platform Was Bad”
This is the reason the rest of this article is not a hit piece on any particular product. The danger was never TeamSite specifically. The danger was depending on a single platform so completely that we could no longer see its faults, let alone walk away from them. Any tool can become that trap. The skill worth having is not loyalty to one platform or scorn for another - it is the ability to recognise, early and honestly, when a platform is going to hold you back.
Over the years we have turned that instinct into something more concrete: a set of warning signs we look for whenever we evaluate a platform, for ourselves or for a client. None of them is fatal on its own, and we will come back to that important caveat. But the more of them you see stacked together, the more confident you can be that a platform will cost you dearly somewhere down the line. We group them into three families.
)
)
