I've spent more than two decades in the industry as a developer, consultant, and architect, long enough to have seen technology shifts arrive with fanfare and depart quietly, leaving organisations to clean up the gap between the promise and the reality. Since 2015 my focus has been on cloud, cloud-native applications, and platform engineering. That work has taken me inside enough organisations to notice patterns that individual projects don't reveal and in particular, how vendor relationships shape technical culture. I'm a Manager at Bekk Consulting in Oslo.
Microsoft Monoculture: The Lock-in Nobody Talks About
– Room 6
Foredragsholder
Om sesjonen
This talk examines a quiet enterprise uniformisation accelerated by Azure and Copilot: the gradual replacement of engineering judgment with Microsoft as the default answer to every question. "If it is from Microsoft, we should probably be using it." .NET, SharePoint, Teams, Bicep, Copilot, PowerShell — no engineering evaluation, no cost analysis, no critical thinking. "Following Microsoft best practices" is mistaken for strategy and treated as a silver bullet.
This pattern is not new. Microsoft's ecosystem has traditionally been proprietary, and developers long ago learned to treat its offerings as the safe default and everything else as a risk. That cultural habit has driven the massive adoption of Office 365, Teams, and Azure — not through careful assessment of alternatives, but through a continual default to the path of least resistance.
Microsoft's cloud strategy creates a lock-in far deeper than most organisations realise. Azure alone is manageable. Azure + Office 365 + Entra ID is a triple lock most organisations never see coming. In a European context where digital sovereignty is an active political conversation, this deserves to be named plainly.
The same pattern is now repeating in AI. Copilot is not winning enterprise evaluations — it is bypassing them. It arrives pre-attached to existing EA agreements before anyone has asked a technical question. Capable, enterprise-grade alternatives simply never become visible.
This talk is an eye-opener for organisations that adopt Microsoft products uncritically, even inadequate ones, simply because it is easier contractually or organisationally. Microsoft monoculture means innovating at Microsoft's pace and on Microsoft's terms — whether you chose that or not.
Passer for
Developers, architects, tech leads, and IT leaders
Samtidig i programmet
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- Sanntidsinformasjon i saksbehandlingssystemer Room 5
- Self-Healing Rollouts: Automating Production Fixes with Agentic AI Room 7
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