Mittelstand on Pfisterer Consulting

My LinkedIn strategy as code: building a multi-agent content pipeline

Tue, 19 May 2026 15:00:00 +0200

Last Sunday, 22:00. On my desk are eleven Markdown files, next to them an open spreadsheet with 90 days of LinkedIn analytics. Cold mate in the glass, an honest question in the back of my head about why I am building a pipeline rather than writing the next post.

The spreadsheet gives a clear answer. My profile has 511 followers and delivered 44,483 impressions over the last 90 days at an engagement rate of 0.18 percent, a factor of 11 to 16 below the LinkedIn benchmark of two to three percent. On 52 of those 90 days the feed stayed entirely silent, without a single reaction to any of my posts.

The Weaker System Won: What a 12-Week M&A Integration Teaches About ERP Selection

Mon, 18 May 2026 07:00:00 +0200

Friday 18:00. 80 employees log out of their old ERP. Monday 08:00. The same 80 log into the new one.

The new one is objectively weaker.

Context: M&A integration. In 2025, an international corporation acquired an 80-person Mittelstand firm from professional services. Requirement: all systems and data into the corporate IT estate. Over a single weekend. No business interruption.

The corporate ERP could do less than the one it replaced. Different cost accounting, different reports, two incompatible data models. It still had to run.

Six Hours, Eighteen Years: What NGINX Rift Tells the Mittelstand

Fri, 15 May 2026 07:00:00 +0200

On May 13, 2026, F5 and security researcher depthfirst publish a disclosure with weight behind it. CVE-2026-42945, codenamed NGINX Rift, CVSS 9.2. Unauthenticated remote code execution in the ngx_http_rewrite_module of NGINX. Affected: all open-source versions from 0.6.27 through 1.30.0 and NGINX Plus R32 through R36. The bug has been in the code since 2008. Eighteen years.

The actual punchline sits in the disclosure footnote. The bug was not found by a human researcher. It was found by an autonomous AI analysis system. Six hours of runtime against one of the most thoroughly reviewed open-source codebases on the planet. This is the direct confirmation of the thesis I sketched on May 13 in the article on the Mythos Glasswing asymmetry as something coming. It arrived a week later.

The Glasswing Asymmetry: What Mythos Finds in Firefox and What the Mittelstand Should Learn

Wed, 13 May 2026 07:00:00 +0200

On May 5, 2026, Mozilla publishes an unusually candid blogpost: An early version of Anthropic’s newest model, Claude Mythos Preview, has found 271 security vulnerabilities in Firefox over the past weeks. 180 high-severity, 80 moderate, 11 low. Some of the bugs sat undiscovered in the code for 15 years, meaning since 2011. Patches went out in Firefox 149.0.2, 150, 150.0.1, and 150.0.2.

That alone would be a substantial story. What makes it matter for the German Mittelstand is the footnote: Mythos is not publicly available. Anthropic currently hands the model only to eleven organizations under a program called Project Glasswing. The list contains U.S. hyperscalers, U.S. banks, U.S. security vendors, and the Linux Foundation. No German company. No European company outside Linux.

Nine Seconds to Data Loss: What the PocketOS Crash Teaches German Mittelstand

Mon, 04 May 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Thursday, April 24, 2026, late evening in Utah. Jer Crane, founder of the U.S. SaaS company PocketOS, has his Cursor agent running. A routine pass through staging, powered by Claude Opus 4.6. What happens next has shown up in nearly every AI-risk talk this year: the agent deletes the entire production database in nine seconds. Backups included.

PocketOS makes software for car rental companies. Reservations, payments, customer records, vehicle tracking. Three months of data were gone. Customers showing up Friday morning to pick up a rental car found no booking in the system. Crane spent hours reconstructing reservations from Stripe payment histories, calendar integrations, and email confirmations.

Mid-Market ERP 2026: Four Reports, One Uncomfortable Pattern

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0200

The CFO of a mechanical engineering firm from the Sauerland drops a stack of reports on the table. On top is the DSAG Investment Report, then the Trovarit user study, then a printed Bitkom chart. At the bottom lies an email from Microsoft about the new Dynamics 365 pricing. Across from him sits the IT lead with a green folder of proposals: SAP Private Edition, Dynamics 365 Business Central, plus a NetSuite pitch from last week. Four data sources, three ERP options, one question that only hangs quietly in the room: who reads these reports from the user’s perspective, rather than the vendor’s?