Can you walk?

Remember when switching to a new mobile phone carrier meant you would lose your number? You stayed put because everyone had your number or, if you did switch, you had to text your new number to your whole address book. Switching was expensive, so practically no one did it.

Then the rules changed: number portability came in and you could just take your number with you. Overnight, the lock-in evaporated and the market became more competitive.

Hold on to that feeling…

A major reason a supplier has power over you isn’t price or features, it’s whether you can take your stuff and leave.

The phone number portability happened because it was forced by a regulator not out of operators’ kindness. The EU is pushing in the same direction for data, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The little changes they have tried to impose have ended with malicious compliance from big tech. It’s going to take a lot of back and forth before anything, if anything, ever happens

So, freedom to move your data can’t be something a company grants you, because anything granted can be made deliberately painful or even taken away. It has to be structural.

That’s what you get from an open tool: no gatekeeper at the door deciding how wide to open it because, well, there’s no gatekeeper at all.

And, no, this doesn’t mean running servers in a corner of your office. Plenty of European companies will host an open tool for you and bill it like any subscription. The difference is the exit path: if they let you down, you subscribe to the same tool elsewhere, move your data, and carry on. With proprietary tools, you can’t just abandon the host, you have to abandon the tool and probably your data too.

So, yet another question to ask before signing up to something is: if I want to move, can I? And will I still have all my data when I get there?

Colin