Part 1 of 8. This series is written plain, with short lines and everyday words.
What this post covers
- What changed in how you buy technology.
- Why it changed.
- Why leaving a supplier got harder.
- Why open source did not put a stop to it.
- Where the whole thing has ended up.
The change
Twenty years back, you bought software.
You paid once. That copy was yours. You could keep using it as long as it worked.
Now most software is rented. You pay every year just to carry on using it.
Stop paying, and it stops working. You own nowt.
That is what a subscription is. A subscription is a payment you make over and over to keep hold of a service.
The same thing happened to computing itself. You used to buy servers. Now a lot of outfits rent their computing from a cloud provider.
A cloud provider is a company that runs the computers for you, in its own buildings.
Why it changed
Let us be fair about this, because it matters. It changed because renting was often the better deal.
Buying servers costs a lot up front. Renting costs very little up front.
Cloud services were reliable and quick to set up. Small teams got tools that only big companies could afford before.
Subscriptions brought regular updates too. No more planning a great upheaval every few years.
So most outfits moved, and they had good reason. Nobody was forced.
The question this series asks comes later. It is about what happens once going elsewhere has become difficult.
Why leaving got harder
Here is the part that matters.
Every step in this change shifted where it was hard to leave.
At first it sat in the file format. A file format is the way a program saves your work. If only one program could open your files, you kept buying that program.
Open file formats sorted that. Most documents today open in more than one program.
So the hard part moved. It went to the interface.
An interface is the way one piece of software talks to another. Build all your systems round one supplier’s interface, and changing supplier means rewriting the lot.
Then it moved again, to your data.
Shifting a small amount of data is easy enough. Shifting years of it is slow, and some providers charge you for taking it out.
Each move made the software itself matter less. As such, what counts now is how much work it would take you to leave.
Why open source did not put a stop to it
Open source software is software whose code anyone can read, use and change.
Plenty of people expected it to solve this. It solved a real part of it, but not the part you would think.
Open source won. Most of the internet runs on it. The code for most of the important pieces is there to read.
The hard part of leaving did not go away, though, because it had already moved on.
You can read every line of a database. You still cannot easily shift 5 years of data out of the managed service running it.
A managed service is where a provider runs the software for you, so you do not have to.
The code is open. The service is not.
There is a second point here, and it is a fair one.
A lot of open source is kept going by volunteers who are not paid. Big companies build products on that work.
In 2024 a widely used compression tool was found to have harmful code hidden in it. That tool was maintained by 1 unpaid person. Bruce Schneier and others wrote it up in detail.
The lesson is not that open source is risky. It is that shared work everyone leans on needs paying for, and often is not.
Where it has ended up
Put those steps together and you get where we are now.
A small number of companies provide the services most outfits depend on.
Most of those companies sit in 1 country, the United States.
Research gathered by the EuroStack project puts non-European providers at around 85% of the European cloud market.
No single decision did this. It is the result of a great many sensible choices, made one at a time, over 20 years.
That is what makes it a trend and not an event.
What it means for you
None of this says American software is poor. Much of it is very good, which is exactly how it got everywhere.
It does mean 1 question matters more than it used to.
How long would it take you to move to a different supplier?
That number decides a fair bit, and part 2 explains why.
First published: 2026-08-25. Last updated: 2026-08-25.