Why Small Business Deserves A More Competitive Tech Ecosystem

TLDR: A competitive tech ecosystem with tens of thousands of competing companies and products is crucial to serve small businesses, which make up 99.9% of all U.S. employers. This competition lowers costs, drives innovation, and creates specialized tools that help small businesses thrive. Unplugged believes small businesses deserve a truly private, liberated alternative to the surveillance capitalism offered by large technology conglomerates. We support open standards, and we believe that data migration should be seamless and unimpeded. The business should always remain in control.

In the modern economy, technology giants and global conglomerates suck up the media oxygen. Trillion-dollar valuations, groundbreaking large language models, or the next disruptive robotics manufacturer dominate the headlines and drive the conversation among the business and political elites.  

While these titans shape the economic landscape, the true lifeblood of social and middle-class resilience is built in their shadow. Small businesses form the backbone of our communities.  They make up 99.9% of all businesses, and they employ more than 59 million people or about 45.9% of all American workers.  

The Small Business Administration defines any business with less than 500 employees as a small business. However, that doesn’t provide an accurate picture, as most people would not consider a business with 450 employees “small.” There are between 34 and 35 million businesses in the United States, and 28 million have no additional employees besides the owner(s), and 6 million are employer firms with one or more employees – usually just a handful. 

For these small enterprises, survival and growth are not abstract concepts but pressing realities.  

A Healthy Technology Ecosystem

One powerful, yet underappreciated factor in the plight of these small businesses is a healthy, diverse, and competitive technology ecosystem. Tens of thousands of fledgling technology companies scrap daily to carve out their own niche and to win small business customers one-by-one.  

A thriving tech ecosystem isn't just about having more choices; it's about creating a dynamic environment where innovation is a do-or-die imperative, prices are kept in check, and aspiring tech entrepreneurs dig deep to solve real-world problems for their customers.  

There’s another notable difference between a large business and a small business. Many big businesses are content with only serving other big businesses and governments. When a single company or a small cartel of players dominates a market, the result is stagnation and high prices. By contrast, a competitive marketplace is an engine of empowerment.

Lack of Competition Hurts All of Us

The most immediate impact of a competitive tech landscape is cost. In a market dominated by a single provider for a critical service, whether for payment processing, e-commerce software, or cloud hosting, providers with too much monopoly power can set prices with impunity.

Stepping outside the technology space, we see the consequences of monopolistic power and rigidified businesses propped up by regulation in many sectors of the economy.

Think about the cost of hospital treatment, or perhaps, the cost of obtaining repair service or new installation from the local, state-sponsored power company.  Consider the astronomical prices of university tuition. These are all industries where prices consistently outpace other goods and services, even in an environment of elevated inflation.

What do hospitals, power companies and universities have in common? These are all entities, where massive government subsidies (loans and direct payments) and regulations are layered throughout their respective markets. When you compare these services with more competitive, less-regulated markets, the difference between the lower prices and much higher levels of service in the less-regulated industries versus the state-supported sectors is readily apparent. 

For a small business with startup revenues and thin margins, additional costs and bureaucratic burdens can be the difference between profitability and failure.

Fostering Innovation and Specialization

Price is only the beginning. The most profound benefit of competition is innovation. When companies must fight for every customer, they can't afford to be complacent. They must build faster, more intuitive products. They begin to specialize.

A diverse tech ecosystem means that no single company can be the best at everything. Opportunities for niche players emerge. Instead of a generic, bloated project management tool, a competitive market offers a dozen specialized options: one built specifically for creative agencies, another for software developers, and a third for construction firms. This specialization allows small businesses to operate with a level of efficiency and precision that was once unimaginable.

Big Tech companies are forced to sharpen the pencil too. Suddenly, a sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) system or a powerful analytics suite is no longer a luxury reserved for corporations with deep pockets. It becomes an affordable tool for the local bakery or an online craft store. This accessibility is the first and most crucial gift of a competitive ecosystem.

Vendor Lock-In and Data Sovereignty

One of the most insidious dangers of an oligopolistic tech market is vendor lock-in. This occurs when a technology provider makes it prohibitively difficult or expensive to switch to a competitor's service. They achieve this through proprietary data formats, closed APIs, or by deeply integrating their product into a larger suite of services, on which a business depends.

For a small business, being locked in with a single vendor can put a stranglehold on adaptation and innovation. It means they are at the mercy of that vendor's price hikes, feature updates (or lack thereof), and terms of service. Their most valuable asset is their customer data, and this too is sometimes held hostage.

A diverse, competitive tech ecosystem actively combats this. Competing platforms and services have a powerful incentive to make it easy for customers to migrate from their rivals. They promote open standards and provide tools for seamless data import/export. This freedom of movement gives small businesses leverage. This ensures that the business, not the technology vendor, remains in control.

Unplugged: A different Option for Small Business 

Unplugged believes small businesses deserve a truly private, liberated smartphone alternative to the surveillance capitalism offered by the large technology conglomerates.

Surveillance capitalism impacts small businesses by creating an uneven playing field. Large tech firms leverage vast data resources to dominate markets, while smaller entities struggle to compete. The expansion of data-driven business models enables major platforms to influence consumer behavior through predictive analytics and behavioral modification, often at the expense of smaller competitors who lack comparable data infrastructure.

Data is valuable, and we believe businesses should prudently use privacy-respecting data to make efficient decisions in a modern economy. We have no interest in utilizing the customer data of our small business users for our own purposes. The tradeoff between personal data privacy or even privacy for a business as a whole has been severely eroded by the Big Tech business models. We are paving a different road.  

We support open standards, and we believe that data migration should be seamless and unimpeded. The business should always remain in control.

We are finding many of our customers are buying UP Phones for some or all the key employees in their companies. They are looking for an exit from the Big Tech data vacuum, and they want to regain control of their internal communications. Unplugged is competing to attract security-conscious businesses, which are willing to give focus and investment to protect their users’ data and minimize the collection of unnecessary data. We are driving progress in critical areas like cybersecurity, accessibility, and data privacy.

A More Resilient Economy

When small businesses thrive, they create jobs, foster local economies, and build more resilient and diverse supply chains. They also knit the social fabric of a freer, happier, wealthier people. They incubate new ideas and cultivate the proving grounds for future entrepreneurs. When nurtured, some of these businesses will become the large businesses of the future. 

A healthy market for technology products provides these important players in our economy with the affordable, specialized, and flexible tools they need to succeed. This is a multiplier for economic growth.

Championing the Ecosystem

For the small businesses, the startups, the local entrepreneurs, who constitute 99% of the marketplace, the ideal world is one with no clear winner. It is a messy, chaotic, and vibrant marketplace filled with competing ideas, diverse solutions, and the freedom to start small businesses, and sometimes even fail, in the service of creating better lives for us and future generations.  

If you’ve been considering purchasing UP Phones for you or your team, the holidays is a great time with $150 off the retail price. Experience the Unplugged difference.