I’ve been taking a hard look at the software I rely on day to day.
It’s partly because the current US political landscape feels increasingly unstable. But it’s also because so much of our default productivity and creative toolkit is dominated by a small set of mega-vendors, again, mostly American.
A quick scan of my own habits makes the pattern obvious: Microsoft Windows, Google, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Acrobat, Oracle MySQL. Not all of these are bad per se, and plenty of people have good reasons to keep using them. But when a handful of companies become unavoidable, we all pay for it in lock-in, pricing power and reduced choice.
The risk isn’t just cost; it’s dependency.
If your operating system, office suite, cloud platform, email stack and creative tools all sit inside one country’s corporate orbit, your options narrow fast when politics shifts, policies change, licensing tightens or data rules get complicated.
Continue reading Why I’m reviewing my software stack