Earlier in this series I described the invisible architecture of lock-in as three stacked layers. A document depends on its format, which depends on a rendering engine to become visible, which depends on the fonts that give it its final shape. Each layer is a dependency the user rarely sees and almost never chooses deliberately, and together they explain why “just open it in something else” so often fails. The argument has always been structural rather than moral: it does not matter whether the vendor is benevolent or predatory, because the dependency exists either way.
Two pieces of news from late June give me occasion to extend that architecture. They are not, at first glance, about formats at all. But read structurally, they reveal two further layers of dependency that sit on top of the technical ones. Layers I left implicit until now because the technical case was enough to make the point. It is worth making them explicit, because they complete the account of what dependency actually means.
The first piece of news: Microsoft has extended free security updates for Windows 10 by a further year, to October 2027. The original end date for consumer support was October 2026. Hundreds of millions of users, and the institutions that manage them, had organised their procurement, their budgets, and their migration planning around that date. Then the date moved, quietly, through an editor’s note appended to a blog post, with no formal announcement.
The second: Italy’s competition authority, the AGCM, has opened an investigation into whether Microsoft adequately informed consumers when it integrated its Copilot and Designer AI tools into Microsoft 365 and moved subscribers onto more expensive plans. The allegation, still under investigation, concerns transparency and consent: whether users were given a genuine choice, or were migrated to a costlier tier unless they actively opted out.
I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to treat these as two instances of the same thing, and they are not. They are two sides of one coin. A coin has two faces and a single substance. The substance, in both cases, is that the user is not in control of his desktop stack. The faces are different, and naming them precisely is what gives the argument its force.
The temporal layer
The Windows 10 extension is not, on its surface, bad news. A further year of free security updates is, taken in isolation, a gift to users who cannot or will not upgrade. If you read the story as a tale of corporate character – Microsoft breaking its word, Microsoft flip-flopping – you reach for the weakest version of the argument, and you hand a critic the easy reply that extending support is pro-consumer.
The structural reading is harder to answer. The point is not that the date was wrong, or that moving it was wrong. The point is that the date was never yours. The lifecycle of your own desktop – when it is supported, when it is abandoned, when you must spend money on new hardware – is governed by a vendor’s strategic calendar, not by your operational needs. You reorganised a year of planning around October 2026 because Microsoft told you to, and you will reorganise again around October 2027 for the same reason. A benevolent vendor moving the date without consulting you proves the point exactly as well as a cynical one would. You do not own the clock.
This is the fourth layer. Above format, rendering, and fonts sits time. Your dependency is not only in the file, it is in the calendar.
There is a detail in this story that sharpens the point rather than softening it. The free extension is not unconditional: to enrol without paying, a user must sign in with a Microsoft account and sync settings to the company’s cloud. So the price of keeping your old operating system alive is to move more of yourself into the vendor’s stack. The remedy deepens the dependency it claims to relieve. This is the difference, which I have written about before, between a solution and a substitution. A solution would reduce your dependence. A substitution merely relocates it from the operating system to the account.
The commercial layer
The Italian investigation looks, at first, like a different kind of story altogether: a matter of consumer-protection law, of disclosure and dark patterns, with no obvious connection to open standards. And it would be a mistake to press it into service as evidence of format lock-in, because that is not what it is about. The discipline of letting structure carry the argument requires resisting exactly that kind of stretch.
But it illustrates a different layer cleanly, and the layer is real. When your productivity suite is a proprietary bundle, the vendor can change what you are paying for, and how much, without your meaningful consent. New tools you did not ask for are folded into the package, the price rises to match, and the path to opting out is, allegedly, buried. Whether the AGCM ultimately finds against Microsoft is not the point I am making, as the investigation may take until 2027 to conclude. The point is that the arrangement permits this. The economic terms of your daily work are set by a party that is not you, and can be revised by that party at a moment of its choosing.
This is the fifth layer. Above format, rendering, fonts, and time sits price. Your dependency is in the invoice as much as in the file.
What the layers have in common
Five layers, then: format, rendering, fonts, time, price. The first three are technical and largely invisible. The last two are not technical at all, and they are the ones the user feels most directly, in a migration deadline he did not set, in a subscription cost he did not agree to. Listing them together changes the character of the argument. Lock-in is no longer a catalogue of technical grievances of interest mainly to specialists. It is a complete account of dependency, and it reaches every part of how a person works: what his documents are made of, when his tools will stop being supported, and what he will be charged for them.
What unites all five is a single absence: the user has no exit. He cannot take his documents elsewhere without loss because of the technical layers, he cannot escape the vendor’s calendar or its pricing because of the other two. Every one of these dependencies is only possible because there is no door.
That is why I have spent this series on formats, and on rendering, and on fonts, and now on calendars and invoices. They are not separate complaints. They are the same observation seen from different angles, and the observation is this: an open format and a free application are not, in the first instance, about cost or ideology. They are an exit, they are the door that makes every one of these dependencies optional rather than fixed. The Open Document Format and LibreOffice do not promise that you will never depend on anyone. They promise something narrower and more important: the dependency is one you have chosen, and one you can leave.
A vendor’s calendar will always move. A vendor’s prices will always rise. These are not scandals, they are simply what it means to be governed by someone else’s strategy. The only question that matters is whether you are free to walk away when they do. Everything in this series has been an argument that you should arrange your affairs so that you can.
Images by Manfred Steger from Pixabay