It’s a bad enough problem that people have a term for it: “Software Sprawl.” And when your employees are left to their own devices, you can end up with a significant amount of Software as a Service fees on employees’ credit cards. Especially as more things become browser-based, it’s increasingly easier to sign up for more products, even when there is a perfectly good option that’s included in your current software subscription.

I think file sharing is a great one to start off with. In the beginning, there was Dropbox and everyone had to have a Dropbox account. When Dropbox became popular, there were a ton of new start-ups trying to get into the market. Sharefile is one that I’ve heard of recently, but the two big competitors would end up being Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive. OneDrive is actually based on SharePoint Document Libraries which have been around for around 25 years. There was even a client to sync the files to your computer, but since SharePoint was specifically about intranet sites and not internet sites, there could be difficulties sharing files outside of your organization. With Office 365, that limitation was no longer, and OneDrive was born.

I’ve not been able to understand why some folks would want to pay $15 per month to Dropbox when they have OneDrive already in their subscription, but it does happen. And honestly, there are situations where you must have something that Dropbox does, and that’s okay too. But I usually recommend looking at your business practices before signing up for another monthly subscription.

Similarly, video conferencing is a big deal these days. I’m pretty sure we all do it, sometimes more frequently than we’d like to, and I have been on every platform out there. In 2020, Zoom was the first to market as we all had to learn quickly how to communicate without in-person meetings. The number of folks still paying $13 or $18 per month to use it just shows how beneficial it is to be first to market. Had Microsoft made Teams a before we all locked down, I don’t think Zoom would exist today. Google Meet has a smaller, but substantial market presence also, but by and large it’s Teams and Zoom.

The most recent one is AI. We’ve had requests to pipe ChatGPT into people’s mailboxes and documents lately using Azure connectors. And like most of these things, I can see where someone who is on the cutting edge of AI would need to use the latest ChatGPT model as soon as it’s released. But Microsoft’s Copilot is using ChatGPT 5.2, already has this access to your data, and is piped into more applications natively. The only big difference in the AI world is that Copilot is not there just waiting to be used, nor is it the cheapest option.

But beyond cost, there are more reasons to avoid Software Sprawl. One is security based. While we may be able to force users to update their Microsoft Office Apps in a timely manner, we wouldn’t be able to necessarily do the same for software like Open Office. And while Microsoft’s Copilot integrations are at a very deep level, ChatGPT asks for a lot of access to your systems to be able to do the same thing. We’re always big proponents of reducing your attack surface, whether that’s by using Microsoft Defender instead of a third-party antivirus or sticking to Microsoft Edge, from a security standpoint it’s just safer.

There are also compatibility and usability to keep in mind. Microsoft’s products work better together, whether it’s writing a memo with Copilot in Microsoft Word or getting insights into a spread sheet. If you’ve got a bad case of Software Sprawl, you won’t be as efficient copying and pasting between several apps.

-Nate