Most organisations don’t choose technology, they inherit it. A subscription here, a platform there, and before long are locked into an ecosystem designed not around their needs, but around the needs of a handful of enormously powerful corporations.
The good news is that there is an alternative. But first, it helps to understand the problem.
The Costs
Software that you once bought and owned is now rented. Prices rise year on year, often with little notice and no real justification. For many organisations, technology costs have quietly become one of their largest overheads.
This isn’t accidental. The six largest technology companies — Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and NVIDIA — generated a combined revenue of approximately $2.15 trillion in their most recent fiscal years. To put that in perspective, that’s larger than the entire economy of most countries on earth.
In just the first three months of 2025, Microsoft alone reported $70.1 billion in revenue and a net income of $25.8 billion. These are not companies scraping by. These are some of the most profitable organisations in human history — and a significant portion of that profit comes directly from the subscriptions and licences that organisations like yours pay every single month.
The question worth asking is: where does that money go?
The answer is straightforward. It flows upwards, to shareholders, to buybacks, and to some of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. Not to your community. Not to your local economy. Not to you.
https://businesstats.com/big-tech-companies-revenue-comparison-statistics/
Planned Obsolescence
Your hardware still works. Your software still does what you need it to do. But the vendor has decided that this version is no longer supported, that the hardware is no longer compatible, or that the subscription tier you’re on no longer exists. So you upgrade – not because you need to – but because you’ve been left with no choice.
This is planned obsolescence. It is not accidental, and it is not inevitable. It is a deliberate business model designed to keep you spending.
The environmental and financial cost is enormous. Perfectly functional devices end up in landfill. Budgets are consumed by upgrades that deliver little real-world benefit. And the cycle begins again.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Open source software doesn’t have a vendor deciding when your version becomes obsolete. Hardware built to last, and software designed to run on older machines, can serve organisations for years longer and at a fraction of the cost.
Vendor Lock-in
Once you’re in, getting out is designed to be as difficult as possible. Your data is in their format, your workflows are built around their tools, your staff are trained on their systems. Switching feels unthinkable and that’s exactly how they want it.
This isn’t a coincidence. Lock-in is a deliberate strategy. The more dependent you become on a single vendor’s ecosystem, the less power you have to negotiate, to question price increases, or to walk away.
For many organisations, the realisation comes too late. Years of data stored in proprietary formats, email hosted on platforms that charge per user per month, documents that only open properly in software you’re renting rather than owning. The switching cost – in time, money, and disruption – becomes a huge barrier.
But organisations do make the switch. With the right support, the right plan, and the right pace, it is entirely possible to move to open, interoperable systems that you control rather than systems that control you.
Data Exploitation
When a service is free, you are not the customer. You are the product.
But it goes further than that. Even services you pay for are increasingly harvesting data about how you work, what you do, and who you communicate with. That data is analysed, packaged, and used to train AI models, to target advertising, to inform product decisions that benefit the vendor, not you.
For organisations handling sensitive information – whether that’s client data, financial records, or confidential communications – this should be deeply uncomfortable. The platforms you trust with your most sensitive work have terms and conditions that would alarm most people, if they ever read them.
The alternative is to choose tools where you are genuinely the customer. Open source software, self-hosted platforms, and privacy-respecting services exist at least in part because some people decided that data exploitation was not an acceptable price to pay for convenience.
Your data should belong to you. Not to a corporation headquartered thousands of miles away.
Privacy
Privacy is not about having something to hide. It is about having the right to decide what you share, with whom, and when.
That right is being steadily eroded. The platforms that most organisations rely on for email, documents and communication are built by companies whose business model depends on knowing as much about you as possible.
Every click, every search, every document you create is a data point. Aggregated over time, that data builds a picture of your organisation that is extraordinarily detailed.
For individuals, the implications are personal. For organisations, they are also legal. UK GDPR places clear obligations on how personal data is handled and if the tools you’re using are processing that data in ways you don’t fully understand, you may be carrying a compliance risk you’re not even aware of.
Privacy-respecting alternatives exist. They are not always as slick, or as convenient, or as deeply embedded in the way we’ve all learned to work. But they are out there and choosing them is a statement about the kind of organisation you want to be.
Economic Impact
Every pound spent on a Microsoft licence, a Google Workspace subscription, or an Amazon Web Services contract is a pound that leaves your organisation, leaves your community, and leaves your country, travelling to a corporate headquarters or tax haven thousands of miles away.
The scale of this is staggering. The UK public sector alone is committed to spending approximately £1.9 billion every year on Microsoft licences – nearly £9 billion over five years. That is public money. Taxpayers’ money. Money that could be spent on local services, local suppliers, and local people.
And that’s just one company. One contract. One sector.
For smaller organisations like charities, community groups, and small businesses the numbers are smaller but the principle is identical. The technology budget that disappears into a US corporation’s quarterly earnings report is money that isn’t circulating in your local economy. It isn’t paying a local supplier. It isn’t supporting a local job.
Open source software, ethical technology suppliers, and locally-based IT support keep money where it belongs: in the communities that spend it.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/07/uk_microsoft_spending/
https://order-order.com/2025/08/07/government-spends-1-9-billion-annually-on-microsoft/
Environmental Impact
The cloud is not in the sky. It is in vast, power-hungry data centres consuming electricity on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. The IEA estimates that data centres used around 1.5% of the world’s entire electricity supply in 2024 – and that figure is expected to more than double by 2030, with AI the primary driver.
The big tech companies talk extensively about sustainability. The reality is harder to square with the rhetoric. Google’s total greenhouse gas emissions rose 13% in a single year, driven by data centre energy demands. Alphabet’s emissions are up nearly 50% since 2019. Amazon reported a carbon footprint of nearly 68 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent in 2024. Microsoft’s electricity consumption almost tripled between 2020 and 2024.
These companies have net-zero commitments. They also have expanding data centres, growing AI workloads, and emissions that are heading in the wrong direction.
There is also the question of hardware. Devices discarded as obsolete — laptops, phones, servers — represent an enormous and largely invisible environmental cost. The carbon embedded in manufacturing a device is wasted every time a working machine is thrown away before its time.
Choosing software that runs on older hardware, supporting repairability, and selecting ethical suppliers who are genuinely transparent about their environmental impact — these are not small decisions. Collectively, they matter.
https://policyreview.info/articles/news/big-techs-2025-sustainability-reports/2027
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