3 ms·
Ask HN: What happens when you remove lock-in from enterprise software economics?
We’ve been experimenting with enterprise systems where the client fully owns the software, data, and governance — no lock-in, no surveillance incentives, no growth-driven design pressure.
The surprising part isn’t technical feasibility, it’s how many standard vendor assumptions break once retention and upsell are no longer the goal.
Curious if others here have seen similar shifts, or if this only works at small scale.
- FrankWilhoit 9mo agoWhat do the customers' auditors say?
- hydrioxstate 9mo agoIn our experience, it’s been smoother than expected. Clean ownership pushes audits away from vendor trust questions and back onto internal controls. The only place we’ve seen more scrutiny is on the client IT teams that now own operation and governance.
- FrankWilhoit 9mo agoMy former employer was ordered by their auditors (who had permanent offices in the company's HQ building) to scrap homebrew systems that worked and adopt rhymes-with-SteepleCoughed, which did not and could not work, because the auditors' staff were trained on it. I was peripherally involved in a failed effort to retrofit ACL onto another system, which ran on DB2 but had originally been coded on VSAM. After years of valiant resistance, they were forced to replace it with something not named Minimo, and to eat at least $60M of retraining costs, for the same reason. Similar stories abound.