It is not outdated, but _prescient_.  Any third party (company, or otherwise) that you depend on for your business can elect to make your life more difficult (or nigh on impossible) at any time.<p>You may choose to depend on a vendor to an extent, but structure your application in a way that a sudden change in the rules would not be the end of you; e.g., there is more than one cloud provider on which one can use the same Docker images to deploy an application.  And you may choose a business where there are no options _other_ than to depend on a third party; e.g., you wish to sell a native iOS application to iPhone users.<p>Risk is still risk: a potential pitfall or peril.  Sometimes the risk is great enough, compared with the potential return, that the only way to win is not to play.  Regardless, this article discusses a set of risks which exist now more then ever; to enumerate and understand these risks is not outdated thinking, it&#x27;s just good business.