Walk into any plant floor in 2026 and you’ll see something that should be shocking - but somehow isn’t. The PLC running the line was likely designed in the early 2000s. The protocol it’s speaking was probably standardised in 1979. The HMI looks like Windows 95 had a baby with a calculator. And somewhere in the back office, a tired controls engineer is gluing it all together with VBA and ladder logic - and, probably, hopes and prayers.
And this isn’t a story about technical debt. Technical debt implies a deliberate trade-off - you took a shortcut, you know about it, and you’re planning to fix it. What we have in industrial automation is something stranger and harder to talk about: a kind of institutional fear. We are not stuck on legacy protocols because they are the best tool for the job. We’re stuck on legacy protocols because nobody wants to be the person who broke the line.
And the worst part about all of this is that the caution I’m talking about has fundamentally metastasised into something much worse - it’s become an excuse. And the people paying the price are not the vendors, not the integrators, and not even the engineers - it’s the end users. Operators, technicians, plant managers, and ultimately the customers downstream who deal with the consequences of systems that should have been retired a decade ago.
The industrial space needs to be braver. Not reckless, not credulous, not chasing every new acronym that comes out of a vendor pitch deck - but braver than the version of itself that has been hiding behind earned caution as a justification for not doing the harder work. I think FlowFuse represents a much braver way forward, honestly - and I think I have a pretty strong argument for that case in this article.
The frontier technologies are here. The new protocols are here. The new providers are here. The end users have been waiting.
It’s time we stopped making them wait.
Read more: https://kristopherleads.substack.com/p/heres-a-hot-take-for-...
