1. Arrogance Is the Drawbridge

Every great empire in history has been brought low by a version of the same mistake. The fortress is so strong, the moat so wide, and the walls so high, that the people inside begin to believe they have transcended the rules. They stop serving the people beyond the walls. They start feeding on them. And the walls that once protected them become the prison their customers build around them.

Big Tech is no different. The companies that rewrote civilisation put a computer in every pocket, a search engine in every browser, a database under every enterprise and are now fighting a global rearguard action against regulators, customers, competitors, and their own reputations. Not because the technology stopped working. But because the arrogance never did.

This is a story about what happens when companies confuse dominance with relevance. Profit with purpose. And power with permanence.

2. Name That Company

Let me be clear before we go any further. I have no issue with any of these companies. I use their products. My organisation uses their products. Most of the world does. They built things that genuinely changed how we live and work, and that matters. This article is not a boycott call or a conspiracy theory. It is something simpler and more uncomfortable than that.

We seem collectively terrified to discuss the edges. The places where brilliant companies made choices that were not about you, not about the market, and not about progress. They were about control. And the fact that we are scared to say that out loud is itself a problem, because silence is how these patterns get normalised and repeated.

So before the evidence, a game. Below are eight character portraits. Match each one to a company. The rest of this article will tell you if you got it right. No cheating.

#	Portrait	Company
A	The friend who smiles while photographing your life, then sells the photos
B	The toll road operator who buys the only bridge into your city, sets their own price, and watches you pay because there is no other way across
C	The surveillance operative who watches everything you do, everywhere you go, and charges someone else for the information
D	The genius with brilliant products who needs a dozen lawyers in the room before you can buy anything
E	The person who owns the pitch, the ball, and the rules, and takes them all home when they don’t like the score
F	The salesman who sells you a bundle of things you don’t need, that barely work, then disappears
G	The original. The one who was there before any of them. Reliable, institutional, safe. Tastes of absolutely nothing, but somehow still on every table
H	The motivational speaker who sells you a vision so compelling you sign before reading the contract. The conference is spectacular. The product is a 20-year-old filing cabinet with a fresh coat of paint. Every workflow needs a specialist. Every integration needs a consultant. Every email campaign needs a week and a prayer. And when you finally want to talk to your own customers at scale, there is a meter running

Companies to match: Adobe · Amazon · Apple · Broadcom · Cisco · Dell · Google · HP · IBM · Intel · Meta · Microsoft · Oracle · Salesforce · SAP · ServiceNow · Spotify · Uber · VMware · Workday

None of the Above: The portraits in this article are illustrative archetypes. Any resemblance to the conduct of any specific company, named or unnamed, is coincidental. Readers are encouraged to draw no conclusions whatsoever, and to consult their own legal counsel before forming opinions. The author accepts no responsibility for any pattern-recognition that may occur spontaneously in the mind of the reader.

3. The Gatekeeper

Something genuinely extraordinary was built here. A device so well designed, so tightly integrated, so instinctively right that it changed what people expected from technology forever. That part of the story is real and it deserves its credit. What came after is a different story.

For eleven years, a proprietary cable was pushed on every device sold, while the rest of the industry moved on. The move to a universal standard only happened because a regulator legislated it into existence. The environmental defence offered for years, that changing connectors would cause harm, was the argument of a company protecting revenue, not the planet. When the switch finally came, the retirement of the old cable generated a surge of e-waste as millions of perfectly functional cables became landfill overnight. That waste does not just disappear. It leaks toxic materials into soil and water with real consequences for communities worldwide.

The app marketplace built on this platform is the most profitable toll booth in the history of commerce. Every developer who wants access to a billion plus users must use the platform’s payment infrastructure and hand over 30% of every transaction. Courts found that while the platform takes a 30% commission, it only needs about 8 to 12% to actually run the store. The rest is rent. The judge overseeing the most significant legal challenge to this model was unambiguous. She noted the 30% is not tied to anything in particular, and that if there was real competition, that number would move. It has not.

When a major game developer tried to offer players a direct payment option that would pass those savings on, the game was removed from the platform within hours. The legal battle ran for years. When courts ordered that developers must be allowed to link to external payment options, the response was to charge a 27% commission on those external transactions anyway. The appellate court found this was a prohibitive commission, not a compliant one, and held the platform in contempt.

This is the behaviour of a company that does not lose gracefully. It owns the pitch, the ball, and the referee, and writes new rules between quarters. The hardware belongs to the user. The software belongs to the Gatekeeper. The volume buttons on your phone? Those belong to whoever paid the right fee.

4. The Bundler

The personal computer did not get invented here. But it got owned here, in a way so complete that an entire generation of enterprise IT was built around a single vendor’s ecosystem. That is a legitimate achievement. It required genuine innovation, relentless execution, and the ability to move faster than competitors who were often technically superior.

It also required bundling everything together so tightly that choosing something else meant rebuilding from the ground up.

A US court found that the dominance of the PC operating system market constituted a monopoly, and that actions had been taken to crush threats from competitors including browsers, runtime environments, productivity software, and media players. The mechanism was simple. If you wanted the operating system, you got everything else whether you wanted it or not. Internet Explorer achieved a 95% market share not because it was the best browser but because it was already installed on every machine on earth.

The pattern never changed. Decades later the same playbook was run on collaboration software, bundled into productivity suites and deployed across hundreds of millions of desktops not because it won a fair evaluation but because it was already in the licence. The Bundler paid a €497 million fine in Europe for this conduct and was found non-compliant even after the settlement.

The enterprise stack built by the Bundler is genuinely powerful. It works. Millions of organisations depend on it and for good reason. But its power rests significantly on the switching costs it has created over decades. The honest question that most IT leaders quietly never ask is whether their organisation chose this stack or simply never left it.

5. The Auditor

The database that runs global commerce was built here. Financial systems, hospitals, logistics networks, government infrastructure. The technology is not just excellent. For much of the world it is irreplaceable, which is precisely the problem.

The audit team is meticulous and aggressive. For enterprise customers, audits can be highly disruptive, consuming valuable time and resources. But the audit is not a compliance mechanism. It is a revenue weapon. When sales pipelines slow, audits accelerate to fill the gap. An audit is often as much about hitting quarterly targets as it is about enforcing license compliance.

The trap was engineered from the beginning. Main products were installed with extra options and management packs enabled by default, without informing customers that these features must be disabled to avoid license overages. Once a customer fell into the trap, the sales and audit teams worked in a highly coordinated fashion to audit for violations and push cloud products.

The licensing rules are infamously complex and that complexity works to the Auditor’s advantage. Policy documents that are not part of any contract are cited in audits as if they are binding. Software that is installed but switched off still counts. Disaster recovery environments that have never run in production still require a full licence. Gartner predicts that by 2026, at least 20% of organisations using a widely deployed programming language will face an audit. The lawyers are part of the product. That is not a compliment.

6. The Shark

This one requires no metaphor. A 61 billion dollar acquisition closed in late 2023 and what followed was one of the most deliberate and aggressive repricing campaigns in the history of enterprise software.

Customers across Europe faced price increases of up to 1,500% overnight. Some companies confronted the prospect of zero profitability. A major US telecommunications company claimed it was offered a 1,050% price increase, transforming its annual costs from manageable to prohibitive in a single conversation. A British university saw its annual licence cost projected to increase from £40,000 to £500,000.

The product portfolio was consolidated from approximately 8,000 stock keeping units to a handful of mandatory bundles, forcing customers to purchase networking and storage products they had never asked for and did not need. Perpetual licences were abolished. Three and five year subscriptions became mandatory. A 20% penalty was introduced for late renewals.

Then came the legal intimidation. Cease and desist letters were sent to customers who had not yet signed new subscription agreements. Lawsuits were filed against major customers including the US operations of a major European industrial conglomerate.

The Shark did not buy a technology company to grow it. It bought a captive customer base to extract from. The hospitals, public services, and cloud providers caught inside this pricing trap had no rapid exit. Migration takes months. Sometimes years. During which time you pay both the new price and the cost of leaving. This is not a business strategy. It is a hostage situation with a helpdesk.

7. The Confessor

A platform was built here that connected the world in ways that genuinely mattered. Families across continents. Communities that would never have found each other. Movements that changed governments. That is real and it should not be dismissed.

The revenue model that made it possible was never clearly disclosed to the people who agreed to it.

Personal data belonging to up to 87 million users was harvested by a political consulting firm without informed consent. That data was used to build psychological profiles of voters and deliver targeted political messaging designed to influence a presidential election and a constitutional referendum. The platform knew about the data transfer in 2015. It asked for a deletion certification and accepted it. It did not inform users. It was journalists who broke the story three years later.

The business model itself conflicts with privacy-friendly policies because targeted advertising, which makes up over 90% of revenue, depends on maximum access to user data. The privacy settings were not designed to protect users. They were designed to appear to protect users while remaining difficult enough to navigate that most people never changed them.

And then there is the feed. Internal research made public by a whistleblower showed that the platform’s own data scientists understood the engagement algorithm amplified outrage, division, and misinformation because those generated more interaction than accuracy did. Fake news is not a bug in this system. It is the highest octane fuel the engagement engine runs on. The platform knew. The research existed. The feed did not change in any meaningful way because changing it would have cost engagement, and engagement is the product.

The scandal resulted in a 37 billion dollar drop in market capitalisation. The eventual settlement was 725 million dollars. A fraction of a single quarter’s revenue. The incentive structure was temporarily embarrassed. It was not corrected.

The Confessor knows who your friends are, who you are falling out with, what you buy, what you fear, who you desire, how you vote, and how you felt last Tuesday. It sells access to that information. The product was never the platform. The product was always you.

8. The Watcher

Something almost impossibly useful was built here. A search engine so good it became a verb. Maps that work. Email that works. A mobile operating system on most of the world’s phones. A browser on most of the world’s desktops. A video platform that is the second largest search engine on earth. Individually remarkable. Collectively the most comprehensive surveillance infrastructure in human history.

A federal jury ordered payment of 425 million dollars after finding that user data had been harvested from people who had explicitly disabled their tracking settings, with monitoring continuing through partnerships with widely used third party apps despite the user’s instructions. The state of Texas subsequently secured a 1.375 billion dollar settlement, the largest ever obtained by a single state for data privacy violations, covering secret location tracking, incognito search data collection, and biometric data gathered without consent.

A court ruled that antitrust laws had been violated by monopolising the open web digital advertising market. The remedy sought is the divestiture of significant portions of the advertising technology business. The Watcher operates simultaneously as the seller’s tool, the buyer’s tool, and the exchange where the transaction occurs. It is a stock exchange that also owns both brokerages and writes the market rules.

The bargain is genuine. The search is real. The maps are extraordinary. The price is simply that you are permanently enrolled as a data source for a targeting machine you cannot see and cannot leave, because it is embedded in your browser, your phone, and the infrastructure of almost every website you visit.

Over half of UK consumers now deliberately withhold data from brands when given the option. The awareness is growing. The infrastructure is not going anywhere.

9. The Evangelist

There is no better conference in enterprise technology. The production values are extraordinary. The keynote feels like a product launch, a rock concert, and a religious revival rolled into one. Tens of thousands of people leave genuinely inspired. That is a real achievement, and it should not be underestimated. Belief is a powerful thing. The Evangelist sells it better than anyone. The product underneath the belief is harder to love.

The core CRM was architected in the early 2000s and the bones have never really changed. Two decades of acquisitions, bolt-ons, and rebranding have layered new names over old infrastructure without replacing it. The data model that made sense when George W. Bush was in his first term is still the data model your team works around today, with consultants charging enterprise rates to paper over the cracks.

Implementation projects routinely run late, over budget, and under-delivered. Not because the people are bad. Because the product requires a class of specialist so narrow and so expensive that most organisations are permanently dependent on a small ecosystem of partners who have a strong financial interest in complexity remaining exactly as complex as it is.

The campaign architecture tells the story plainly. A communication that should take an afternoon to build, test, and deploy takes a week. Rate limits that exist for technical reasons are priced as a commercial opportunity. Want to talk to your own customers at scale? There is a tier for that. Want to move faster? There is a package for that. Want to do the thing you thought was included? There is a conversation to be had about that.

The vision is always compelling. The roadmap is always ambitious. The next release is always the one that solves it. And the contract you signed in year one, in the glow of the keynote, is the contract you are still explaining to your CFO in year four.

The product was never the software. The product was the story. And the story is very, very good.

10. The Wether

Before any of them, there was this one. The mainframe. The suit. The account manager who has been calling on your organisation since before your CIO was born. This company did not disrupt the market. It was the market, for decades, in a way that makes everything that came after look impatient and reckless.

And it is still there. That is the remarkable thing. Not dominant in the way it once was. Not feared the way the Auditor is feared. Not loved the way the Gatekeeper’s products are loved. The Wether of the technology world. Steady. Castrated of its original aggression by decades of transformation programmes, spinoffs, acquisitions, and consulting pivots. More reinventions than most companies have had product lines.

The honest description today is a company that tastes of nothing. Not in a cruel way. In a deeply institutional way. If you have grown up on the sharp clarity of a beautifully designed product or the addictive convenience of a platform that knows everything about you, the Wether feels like unseasoned chicken. Technically adequate. Nutritionally complete. Completely impossible to get excited about.

And yet survival is its own argument. It never took the ball away. It never sent your hospital a cease and desist letter over a licensing clause. It never harvested your diary and sold it to a political campaign. It got expensive, bureaucratic, and lost the plot on consumer relevance entirely. When the infrastructure weight got too much it was spun off into a separate company. But it did not turn predatory. It just got very, very beige.

There is something to be said for beige. Beige does not get fined 1.4 billion dollars for tracking you in incognito mode. Beige does not get found in contempt of court for charging a prohibitive commission. Beige does not make the news for the wrong reasons. Beige is not the answer. But in a landscape where the most powerful technology companies on earth are being hauled before regulators on multiple continents, the company that simply kept showing up and did not make anyone’s crisis list deserves a quiet nod.

11. The Industry

There is one behaviour that cuts across all of them, and it is the one nobody in the industry is comfortable naming directly.

Which of these companies publicly lists its people as its greatest asset, publishes cultural values with employee wellbeing near the top, runs annual engagement surveys, sponsors wellness programmes, and then in the same quarter it posts record profits conducts a reduction in force of ten or twenty thousand people, calls it a strategic realignment, and watches its share price go up?

Which of them asks its employees to reapply for their own jobs every few months under a performance architecture designed not to develop people but to manufacture a pre-decided percentage of exits, removing the awkwardness of having to make a human decision?

Which of them built an entire employer brand around changing the world, attracted a generation of engineers who believed it, and then quietly introduced monitoring systems to track keystrokes, bathroom breaks, and time between emails?

The answer, uncomfortably, is not one of them. It is most of them. The staff treatment problem in big tech is not an outlier story about one bad actor. It is a pattern. The companies that positioned themselves as the antidote to old economy thinking, the flat hierarchies, the ping pong tables, the mission statements about making the world better, discovered that when growth slowed and shareholders needed reassurance, people were the most adjustable line on the cost sheet. The values did not disappear. They just turned out to be decorative.

12. The Pattern Behind the Pattern

Reading these companies together, a consistent shape emerges that transcends industry, geography, and product category. It has five stages.

In the first stage, a company solves a real problem better than anyone else. The product is genuinely excellent. The value is obvious and the growth is real.

In the second stage, the company achieves a critical scale at which switching becomes painful. The network effect, the ecosystem lock-in, or the data moat makes the alternative genuinely worse, even if it is cheaper or more ethically built.

In the third stage, the company stops competing with the market and starts feeding on its customers. Prices increase beyond the cost of service. Products are bundled to eliminate choice. Audits become revenue engines. Policies are written to create debt. Conferences are used to sell futures that never quite arrive. The engagement algorithm is tuned for outrage because outrage pays.

In the fourth stage, regulators, competitors, and customers begin to organise. The legal battles begin. The fines arrive. The antitrust cases are filed. The ecosystem starts to fragment as alternatives become viable despite the switching costs.

In the fifth stage, a new paradigm arrives. A new distribution model. A new technology wave. A new generation of users who have no loyalty to the old platform because they never needed it. And the moat that protected the empire finds itself on the wrong side of the map. The fortress is still there. It is simply no longer relevant to where the world is going.

Every company in this article is somewhere between stage three and stage five. Some are fighting stage four hard. Others are already quietly negotiating the terms of their irrelevance.

13. Profit Is Oxygen, Not Food

There is a useful distinction between what a company needs to survive and what a company needs to live.

Oxygen is necessary. Without it you die immediately. But you cannot eat oxygen. You cannot grow on oxygen alone. A person who breathes perfectly but never eats will still die. They will simply die more slowly and more confusingly than someone who stopped breathing.

Profit is oxygen. It is necessary. It is non negotiable. Every company that claims otherwise is either lying or fundraising. But profit is not food. Food is relevance. Food is solving a problem that people genuinely have. Food is being the answer to a question someone is actually asking.

The companies in this article are largely profitable. Some are extraordinarily profitable. But several of them have stopped being relevant in the way that matters. Not as infrastructure their customers are trapped inside, but as something their customers would voluntarily choose even if the walls came down.

The healthiest technology companies are the ones that ask themselves, regularly and honestly: if our customers could leave tomorrow with zero switching cost, how many would stay? That question is uncomfortable. It is also the most important diagnostic an organisation can run. It reveals whether you are building loyalty or manufacturing captivity.

14. The Balanced Company and the Long Season

Companies that survive long enough to be genuinely great are almost never the ones that optimised for a single metric. They are the ones that understood they were in a relationship with customers, with talent, with society and that relationships require investment in the other party’s wellbeing, not merely extraction from it.

A balanced company goes through hard times. It has bad quarters. It loses deals. It gets disrupted. But it does not respond to those bad seasons by attacking its customer base to protect its shareholders. It does not manufacture debt through audits. It does not raise prices by a thousand percent because the contract technically permits it. It does not take the ball away when the score gets difficult. It does not sell you a vision it cannot deliver. And it does not tell its people they are family on Monday and make them reapply for their jobs on Friday.

The companies that build moats through genuine excellence, through products people love, through pricing people trust, through policies people can explain without a lawyer, are the ones that endure disruption rather than creating it.

Arrogance is not a personality trait. It is a business strategy. And like all strategies built on the assumption that the world will not change, it works magnificently until the day it does not.

The castle walls are still standing. The drawbridge is already down. The question is whether the people inside can hear the sound of the moat draining.

Andrew Baker is the Chief Information Officer of Capitec Bank and writes regularly on technology, leadership, and the architecture of systems that last.