For many companies, the idea of having the proverbial "One Throat To Choke" is actually a feature not a bug. (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22one+throat+to+choke%22)
The alternative of modular components with interoperable interfaces means more multiple vendors "finger pointing" at each other with the blame game instead of problems getting resolved. Yes, modular components can theoretically combine "best-of-breed" software ... but the extra complexity of interfaces integration is not worth the tradeoffs for many CIOs.
>Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
It goes both ways. A lot of USA companies depend on a big German software company (SAP AG) for their global ERP system. This includes Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and most of Fortune 500 companies, etc. They all use SAP for consolidated accounting & finance. Google used to use Oracle (USA) but switched to SAP. SAP is an example of a "integrated system" instead of interfacing a bunch of disparate software silos from various vendors ("accounting software vendor", "demand forecasting software vendor", etc)
The solution is simple: build a business environment that would allow a home-grown alternative to have developed over the last 40 years.
And even if I agreed, they did hire that former MS exec. So they wouldn't have been that alternative, because in no universe would Apple or Google put Stephen Elop in charge of iPhone/Android, and in this universe, Nokia would.
Time travel is a simple and elegant solution to many problems. (Ignoring unintended consequences at least.)
I'm thinking a portfolio of auth, storage, chat, email, code repository, project management... Everything an organization could in theory host itself but realistically does not have the personnel for.
But the most interest thing is that in the process I also wanted to remove my dependency on the other centralized SaaS, so I ended up setting up my own git repository (gitea), my own CI (woodpecker), my own project management tool (Taiga), my own knowledge-base/data sharing tool (Baserow).
On the one hand, I agree with you and think it could be a great business opportunity. On the other, the whole thing is so easy to be completely commoditized that I don't see a practical path to profitability. If I go to investors with the idea, they will say (rightly so) that there is no easy way to establish a competitive advantage. If I bootstrap (like I have been doing with Communick) I can not be fast enough to do both customer acquisitation and development.
That aside, governments have the resources to do this themselves, that's how they currently do so. Extending those services to local organisations would be a step in the right direction.
The thing about services and tooling is that for many orgs, there's not a whole lot you need, and once you're at a scale where you need tooling to manage that scale, you presumably have the resources for an operations team to deal with that, and can outsource the bits you can't do.
The org I work for outsources our public-facing website work to a web-design co, because that's their speciality, and not ours.
All of that is to say; I agree with you, but I think they already exist in the form of SIs.
While I understand what you're saying, isn't that surely the problem?
Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything from the platform you're hosting your infra on, to the tools you communicate with and the software suite running on your workstations; having your org use _everything_ Microsoft might be easy, and a little bit spendy, but the moment Microsoft is off the table, you're left without an org.
Disparate systems from all over the place might very well be more effort, and also likely cheaper/free in terms of licensing costs, which you can then spend on creating jobs and/or contributing back to those systems. The larger your org, the more you'll save and the more you can spend on creating jobs, and more importantly, those jobs can be created locally.
Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.