As business leaders and consumers, we play a crucial role in addressing the harm caused by Big Tech Monopolies. In the past weeks, we’ve explored the issues and their origins. Now, it’s time to delve into actionable strategies we can implement to mitigate these overreaching problems.
First, we’ll explore the benefits of focusing on workflows rather than bundled solutions. Then, we’ll discuss the advantages of integrating multiple solutions to achieve a similar experience and price point. Finally, we’ll highlight the significant benefits of embracing open standards, open data, and open source, which can lead to more substantial innovation and collaboration.
Go With the Flow against Monopolies
Big tech and its offerings have trained us to think in terms of applications. We create a PowerPoint instead of giving an outstanding presentation. We do some Excel instead of data sanitation and visualization. We edit a Word document instead of writing a letter.
We should stop thinking this way about data or tasks. Many fields have shown that focusing on goal-oriented workflows can improve both the outcome and the workers’ experience. Consequently, concentrating on what goals every worker wants to achieve, partitioning them into sensible workflows, and keeping them engaged with just one application during the workflow is paramount to reducing the switching.
Separating the employees’ workflow and goals from the applications creates a mental barrier. The nomenclature of your current provider or the leading big tech monopoly no longer binds you.
It also helps you eliminate the bias often associated with household names. PowerPoint is no longer the only or best method of supplying visuals for an outstanding presentation. Yet, we can only leave the language biases behind by opening up the discussion on the goals and workflows.
Integration instead of Surrendering to Monopolies
Another easy-to-counter advantage of big tech monopolies is their integration. If you log into your Big Tech Cloud software right now, you have a menu that can take you to all sorts of applications. This combined offering can make it very easy for users to engage with IT.
Portal integration, user management, and coherent branding can give the same appearance of a well-thought-out process. Portals and single sign-on can make the changeover between the different tasks seamless and ease reluctance to concentrate on the most valuable duty.
Embrace Openness
When we first signed up for SaaS offerings, cloud services appear to offer an excellent value for money. From start-ups to prominent players, providers offered an increasing array of features at attractive prices to lure us into their vertically integrated ecosystems.
Yet once you are in, you are at the provider’s mercy. While bait-and-switch changes have been a staple in consumer monopolies, for example, with “Money in Excel,” no provider guarantees its service will be available indefinitely. Take Google’s announcement that it will start charging small businesses for its productivity suite, including email accounts, which has caused quite an outcry.
Consequently, portability matters. The ability to import and export your data out of a system can provide you with the crucial ability to move your data to a different provider. It enables your business to continue working, even if your previous service is hiking prices, cutting its offering, or going out of business altogether.
Moreover, it gives you a say in spending your budget most efficiently and frugally. Suppose a provider’s policies and decisions do not align with your employer’s governance. In that case, open interfaces can help you choose a new service and take your data elsewhere.
There are Alternatives to Big Tech Monopolies
Most of the time, the problem is not a lack of alternatives. Our mindset gets in the way and keeps us bound to the applications and services that have made it past the gatekeepers. Once we focus on the question of how to be most productive and efficient and what we want to accomplish, we realize that many of the big tech bundles in our toolbox are nothing more than vendor lock-ins into the respective monopolies.
Consequently, the big task isn’t to find alternatives. It is to accept that we likely have used an inferior product out of convenience. After all, that shows us our faults. However, it also opens us up to finding better alternatives.