“Market leader” is synonymous with mediocrity, and that costs you a lot of money, possibly millions.

Monopolies are fantastic... for shareholders. But not for customers. Customers are often reduced to money machines by monopolists. And what is immediately eliminated in favor of profitability (the shareholder incentive) is quality. Does that make large companies “bad”? No, but as a customer, you want yourself to come first, not the shareholder.

This is not an argument against large companies. It is a practical blog about how to protect yourself from the mediocrity that arises among market leaders. Because if you have no realistic alternative, the relationship changes. Then you are no longer a customer, but a captive audience. Prices can go up without a better product to match. Support can become “good enough.” Roadmaps become marketing. And every frustration you feel becomes an internal KPI that doesn't really hurt anyone.

And no, this is not a rant against one name. This is the pattern.

Monopolies rarely arise by accident. They rarely end up with the party with the best product or the best service. They are the result of strategy. First, be almost unrealistically attractive (lures, discounts, bundles, rapid adoption). Then build in dependency (formats, integrations, processes, “best practices” that only make sense in their world). And once switching becomes expensive, risky, or politically impossible: milk it for all it's worth.

It sometimes looks suspiciously similar to the logic of a drug dealer. First, free “stuff.” Then habituation. Next, quitting becomes impossible and costly.

In IT, it is even more insidious in a sense, because it is not just about your choice. It is network pressure. Your customers, suppliers, and partners are already tied to a single ecosystem. So you no longer ‘choose’; you are manipulated in a certain direction. Try not to participate in a standard communication suite, document format, or identity platform when your entire chain already runs on it. You can stick to your principles, but you will lose momentum. Or you will lose deals.

And in the meantime, the value proposition shifts. Not: better software. But: more lock-in. More license meters. More mandatory bundles. More ‘new’ features that mainly justify a new pricing model. Old wine, new bottles, and a higher bill.

This blog is about what that market power does technically and operationally: why monopoly software often becomes heavier, slower, messier, and more expensive. And how you protect your IT team from footing the bill—because that's what will happen if you're not careful: incidents, migration anxiety, hidden work, and rising costs.

Support shrinks, backlog grows: that's market power in action

As soon as leaving becomes painful for the customer, the market changes for the supplier. Not all at once, but step by step.

Competitive pressure is the strongest external incentive that brings the focus back to quality where it belongs. As soon as that pressure decreases, the focus shifts and with it the roadmap. At first subtly: less “this makes your work faster,” more “this makes our turnover predictable.” And as long as that revenue comes from “loyal customers,” there's little to worry about. But those loyal customers are customers who are trapped in an ecosystem from which it is difficult to break free.

With digital platforms, we see this in the form of “Enshitification” combined with price increases. At best, improvements are not implemented, but sometimes deliberate deteriorations are implemented because this saves costs. Some streaming platforms deliver lower bandwidths over time, a little less each time, so that customers get used to the deterioration without noticing it. Sharepoint Online is another good example. When Sharepoint Online began to gain market share, Microsoft deliberately moved a significant part of its functionality from their servers to the user's browser. This allowed them to serve the same customers with fewer servers. Sharepoint Online became noticeably slower, especially on smaller PCs. And the price went up because of “constant improvements.” Only those improvements were financial improvements for Microsoft itself.

The tipping point is this: profit maximization becomes more important than the customer (value).

Then you get the familiar symptoms. Support becomes a cost item that you minimize or leave to AI. Answers become templates. Escalations take longer. Not because it can't be done, but because it doesn't have to be done.

Bugs? They sink into the backlog. Or they become “known issues.” Resolved when it happens to be convenient—or when it harms sales. If customers can hardly leave or do leave, urgency is a luxury by-product.

And in the meantime, pricing strategy becomes product strategy. Bundles, mandatory upgrades, new license meters, “editions” that mainly exist to hide features behind a higher price tag. The software hardly changes. The invoice does.

That's no coincidence. It's logic. In the eyes of the market leaders.

For you as a customer, it means one thing: your risk grows while your bargaining power evaporates. And your IT team gets the dirty job: keeping things running in a system that's less and less about you.

What are the consequences for you?

Poor software quality is not just an annoyance. It is a cost driver.

It starts with performance. Every extra second of waiting time is productivity lost: tickets that remain open longer, orders that leave the door later, colleagues who come up with workarounds because “the system is slow again.” And what is the reflex response? Scale up. More CPU, more RAM, more nodes.

But that's not a real solution. It's just a band-aid.

More hardware also means more licenses. More cores, more users, more “editions.” And in a market where it hurts to leave, you rarely see the pricing model get any friendlier. So you pay twice: first for the extra capacity you didn't really want... and then for the right to use that capacity.

This isn't the law of diminishing returns. This is the law of increasing diminishing returns: the more you add to suppress the pain, the less effect it has. And the higher the bill gets.

And then there's security. In July 2024, the CrowdStrike incident showed how badly a poorly maintained platform can backfire. It was just a bug in a CrowdStrike Falcon content/config update. But it affected Windows systems worldwide and caused BSOD/boot loops at organizations using that stack. It wasn't an attack, but an update that was enough in kernel context to shut down business operations.

But what everyone seems to have forgotten, or what we would rather not remember, is that Crowdstrike was made possible by a 15-year-old bug in the Windows kernel that Microsoft was already aware of. They didn't fix it because it wasn't a priority. Worse still, they're not going to fix it now either. The reason? Customers aren't going to leave en masse.

The lesson is uncomfortably simple: the bigger the monopoly, the less inclined a supplier is to fix even critical security bugs. And in a market with little competitive pressure, “resilience by design” is rarely the first thing to win out over “faster rollout” and “cheaper operation.”

The consequence for you: more friction, more costs, more risk. And fewer real buttons to push.

What you can do today to protect yourself?

Monopolists are not going to solve this for you. Not because they can't, but because they don't have to.

Fortunately, that doesn't mean you are powerless.

In virtually every environment—on-premises and cloud—there is still room to significantly limit the damage and make substantial improvements. Not by “adding more,” but by making smart choices. So that you can once again steer based on facts rather than assumptions.

Sciante knows how. We have been working with organizations for over 15 years to make applications and infrastructure demonstrably faster, more stable, and cheaper. Even if the manufacturer does not cooperate. Perhaps especially then. We know where performance and costs lie.

Want to know how much acceleration and savings are possible in your landscape?

Schedule a free 30-minute call. You'll get immediate clarity: where the leaks are, what the benefits are, and what the most logical first step is. Think that's impossible? Give us a try, it'll only cost you a little time.