Why Have We Accepted That Software Vendors Set the Terms?
Software vendors set roadmaps, deadlines, and licensing terms. Leaders are starting to question why. Learn more at Origina.com.
When Commercial Decisions Become Mandates
Somewhere along the way, a strange idea took hold in business: that the companies selling software can also decide how their customers run it.
When a vendor sets an end-of-support date, organizations scramble to migrate. When it rewrites a licensing model, they pay. When it ships a new version, they upgrade, whether or not the previous one was still doing the job. These moves are treated as facts of life. They are nothing of the sort. They are commercial choices made by one party, in that party’s interest, and the market has quietly agreed to call them inevitable.
When Software Vendors Hold the Advantage
The pattern is easy to see once you look for it. After Broadcom acquired VMware, some customers saw licensing costs rise by as much as 1,400%. That was not a response to market forces or a leap forward in the technology; the software on those servers worked exactly as well the day after as the day before. What changed was who held the power, and how they chose to use it.
Broadcom is not an outlier. In Flexera’s 2025 State of ITAM report, managing software use rights has become the single biggest concern for the specialists who track these contracts, up from sixth place a year earlier, while 45% of organizations report spending more than $1 million on vendor software audits over three years. The terms, the audits, and the timelines increasingly belong to the supplier, and the costs land on the customer.
The Difference Between Ownership and Control
The dynamic resembles a rental car. You can drive it, but you can’t repaint it, you can’t change the wheels, and when something breaks, you take it back to the company you rented it from. You have use, but not control. That trade-off suits a week’s holiday. It is a strange way to run the systems a business depends on, and it rests on a story the industry has sold for years: that ownership equals obsolescence.
None of this is a conspiracy. Vendors behave this way because they can, and because customers let them. They are businesses, and as long as buyers accept the terms, the terms keep getting worse. The remedy is not outrage but curiosity. The most useful question a leader can ask is not “what does the vendor recommend?” but “what does the business actually need, and who decided otherwise?”
The Alternative to Software Vendor Control
That question matters because an alternative exists. Software a company already owns can be supported, secured and extended for as long as it serves the business, without surrendering the roadmap to the supplier. It is the thinking behind independent providers such as Origina, and the reason a growing number of leaders are asking the question at all. The vendors’ real advantage was never the technology. It was assumed there was no other way.
Stop accepting that assumption, and the decisions return to where they belong: with the business, not the supplier.
