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Series

Platform Strategy & Vendor Economics

Where lock-in goes when formats open up, protocols standardize, and AI agents enter the stack. An ongoing analysis of enterprise platform decisions, vendor positioning, and the switching costs that compound when nobody is looking.

3 parts · 33 min total · Apr 2026 – May 2026

The recurring discovery across enterprise platform evaluations: openness at one layer doesn’t eliminate lock-in. It moves it upward. Open storage formats push lock-in to semantic models and governance. Open agent protocols push it to identity and registries. The layer that’s open gets commoditized; the layer above it is where the durable switching costs accumulate.

This series tracks that pattern across the enterprise software landscape (cloud data platforms, AI agent infrastructure, API management) wherever a vendor is running the “we’re open” playbook and the real constraints live somewhere above the open layer.

  1. Part 01 10 min Open at the Bottom, Locked at the Top: The Real Story of Microsoft Fabric Microsoft built Fabric on Delta Lake, Parquet, and open table formats. That's not generosity; it's a strategy. The lock-in didn't disappear. It moved.
  2. Part 02 11 min The Agent Control Plane War: MuleSoft Agent Fabric vs. Microsoft Foundry + Agent 365 Microsoft and Salesforce are both pitching the same thing this month: govern every AI agent in your enterprise. If you're on Anypoint, you may already have one.
  3. Part 03 12 min Who Issued the Agent? Your Okta federation governs human identity. Your Copilot Studio agents got Entra Agent IDs. These are different governance planes, and they don't talk to each other.
Start with Part 1 →