So imagine a large organization that’s very old and provides a service to the public. Throughout the history of this organization, they’ve had some relationship with technology. Originally—over a century ago—they had to design most of their own technology, because it didn’t exist yet. So all expertise to manage that technology was kept in house, either because the people who designed it stuck around to maintain it, or they trained people who were hired by the organization and subsequently spent their whole careers there.

Over time, technology became more complex, and more complex, and more complex. Computers became a thing. Maybe the organization hired an outside vendor to set up a mainframe, and then hired some people to write and maintain code for it. Eventually most of those people retired or moved on to other gigs, and eventually the mainframe became obsolete. So more vendors were hired, and more programmers were hired, but ultimately it was easier to just hire the vendor and they’d write the software for you.

Fast forward to the last 10-20 years. Now you have an organization that relies more heavily on technology than it ever has before. It’s not just a part of their core business – literally every aspect of the organization’s operations involve some kind of technology. Communications, finance, security, data processing, archiving, even facilities. Thankfully, many of those business processes are fairly standard, so the technology that facilitates them can be bought right off the shelf.

But there are a few integral parts of this organization that are still very intricate or specialized. And there are very few implementations of technology out in the world which can be purchased without some amount of customization. Or maybe there are none, so there’s still a need to maintain a fully custom solution. But the organization stopped maintaining technology in-house decades ago. So the niche software, or the custom software, has to come from an outside vendor.

Enterprise technology vendors know this well. They are finely tuned to swoop in with colorful marketing about niche or customized solutions, and woo the executive buyer with promises of fully managed and integrated solutions to precisely fit the organization’s business need. These vendors are experts at selling their product, and executive buyers love them. But the product itself?

The product itself is bad. If it’s existing software, it was designed decades ago and has barely been updated to keep up with modern software development or user experience principles. It has all the usability of a pile of gravel. It’s confusing, bloated, buggy, and costs tons of money just in hardware to run it, let alone the cost of licenses and support contracts. There are no APIs, and feature requests to improve it go into a black hole.

Customized software isn’t a much better situation. If it was finished at all, the contract probably went over budget and delivered on fewer features than promised. The organization may have neglected to negotiate for the right to own what was delivered, and definitely forgot to ask for source code. The vendor must be kept on retainer to maintain the software, but after the initial contract is up, they rarely have time to devote to future customizations, because they’re on to their next engagement.

Yet, this technology that the executive buyer sunk a fortune into, this pile of garbage, has to work. Because now the organization has no other option. So they stick with it, and integrate it deeply into their business processes, and become hopelessly dependent on it. And when the contract comes up for renewal, they have no choice but to sign. Even when the cost of the licenses or the support or the maintenance doubles or triples or quadruples. Because to rip it all out and start all over would be impossible.

This is the Technology Vendor Industrial Complex. Enterprise technology vendors whose business model is to be as “sticky” as they can within their clients’ businesses, and extract as much wealth as possible, while doing the bare minimum to keep their products operable in order to maximize profit. And the organizations who are preyed on by these vampires—who have long since lost their capacity for technological innovation, due to brain drain, or austerity measures, or just a breathless Reagan-era belief in the benefits of Outsourcing™—have no choice but to offer their necks, year after year.