Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their products or pay for access to their services – their core focus. The focus has instead turned towards the stock price.
Their real clients, the entities they really care about, are the stockholders. Reasons are many, perhaps one of them being that people making decisions tend to own stock options or have bonuses tied to stock performance of the companies they run.
This means that for a large, established tech company the product or service it offers does not matter all that much anymore. It needs to be just barely good enough to keep people using it. The easiest way to do this is some form of a monopoly.
Monopoly is the business model of Silicon Valley, and they are not even shy about that.
Monopoly as a business model¶
If you ever tried moving an organization wholesale from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 (or whatever it is called this week), you know what I mean.
These are two sets of office productivity services; on a basic level their functionality is very similar. Mail, calendar, contacts, document editing, access controls, and so on. And yet you can’t even directly share a file from Google Workspace to a person who uses Microsoft 365 (or vice-versa) in a way that would allow them to access it within their own service, using their existing account, without manually exporting and importing the file.
Sidenote¶ This lack of basic interoperability is not a technical necessity but a business decision. For example, Open Cloud Mesh protocol allows for a lot of interoperability between providers of such office productivity services, and is implemented by Nextcloud. What this means in practice is that two people with accounts on different independently-run instances of any software implementing this protocol, hosted at two different providers, could not only share, but collaborate on a file – each from their own account, using a familiar interface.
Someone confidently using one of the two largest online office suites can quite reasonably feel completely lost when presented with the interface of the other. Interoperability and data portability between them seems like science fiction, to a point where it is genuinely difficult for some people to even understand the concept.
Barriers to migration¶
... continue reading