No doubt about that, but for basic infrastructure like DBMSs the customer of the future will be another tech company. Try extracting the same margins for a database system from, say, Airbnb or Uber as from a mid-sized bank founded in 1888.
Use to Stability, and Profitability not growth was important.
Stability, and Profitability were the goal, growth followed but was not in itself a goal
Now even if you are profitable, if you are not seeing growth then you failed. It is ridiculous.
The role of technology is to drive productivity growth, which is ultimately the only thing that improves living standards (or at least has the potential to do so).
A pizza sold in 1987 is just as useful as a pizza sold in 2017 measured by its nutritional value. But the same is not true of technologies from 1987.
These mega vendors drive co-dependency, not innovation.
Even at their most dominant, Microsoft kept adding things customers wanted. AD was a big leap forward for customers, when Microsoft could have rested on the domain model. SQL Server kept adding capabilities, Exchange, etc.
CAL's for example would never be possible with out Vendor Lockin, What kind of extortion scheme do you have to have to sell a server licence then charge for every thing that wants to connect to the server.....
Etc. etc. etc.
They also found a new way to apply that same model with 0365 and their continual effort to add new features that only cost a "few dollars more per user per month"
Squeezing locked in customers is the Enterprise Software way... all of them do it.