Unless we start thinking a lot more about how we choose products and vendors, we are just going to build our own European tech giants and the tech broligarchy will follow anyway.
We need to kill the mindset of “I can only use this particular product” whether it is O365, Coca Cola, Tesla or European equivalents. There is always another product and where you put your money has as real consequences as a democratic election.
The reason there isn’t always another product is because the industry is full of anticompetitive practices like proprietary file formats and collaboration (read: cloud) features. Ironically MS Office is one of the less anticompetitive ones. Stuff like CAD software is full of this nonsense.
And the anti-competitive practices won’t stop unless we persistently step on corporations’ necks. Capitalism incentivizes these behaviours.
Sure, you should avoid products and vendors that lock you in or even just try to nudge you to using their other products (because that’s usually how the lock-in starts). O365 changing the default save location to Onedrive comes to mind. (Insert Hank Hill onedrive meme).
I guess there can be cases where you truly don’t have much of a choice.
I’d argue that if you write CAD software with your own open source file formallt, chances are that people would not bother implementing it, unless your application gets traction. Small niche products wouldn’t even be at risk by open sourcing (IMHO)
In practice firms consolidate regardleas of individual wallet voting. Wallet voting has no bearing on one corporation acquiring another. It has also no bearing on a few corporations dividing the user base amongst each other through lock-in and unofficial cooperation. If wallet voting was a strong influence, pervasive market failure wouldn’t be a thing. The fact is that firms accumulate financial capital over time, buy failed competitors along with their customers, then rinse and repeat until there’s few firms left. And they have vastly more money and therefore vasrly more “votes” that they use in various “elections” than individuals. Individual wallet voting could only ever work if massively organized and that is extremely difficult to achieve. Not the least due to these same firms spending their capital to keep individuals from collectively voting, via various well-known behaviour modificaton techniques.
Sure, but if sales inevitably drops after a large acquisition, it would be a better market for smaller players and less incentive for the megacorps to gobble up everything.
They better be built on FOSS. Not only that would help with the market failures others highlighted in this thread, but it would produce an industry American firms can’t compete with due to the lower software cost. Software implemented once, then shared at no additional cost is a significant competitive advantage than having to have dedicated softwate teams implementing the same things at every corporation but differently, in order to create lock-in.
Most government software can be open sourced, stay open sourced and be collaborated on openly, even across countries. In fact that is far better than being dependent om any type pf giant. Even domestic giants can turn international and suddenly be owned from somewhere else.
Well done Trump
TLDR digital sovereignty.
Hail digital sovereignty
