IMO, There is no "middle-ground" to the situation.

I wanted to write a blog post about it as I was thinking the same but I guess a comment will help me get my thoughts across just as much.

Either we are gonna see a convergence to hyperscalers as you mention, or we would go back to completely indie companies which compete on perf/price.

There could still be some value to "nicer to use" certainly but with AI, we are gonna see almost every product as being "good-enough" if I am able to convey my sentiment.

An anecdote is: Proton's an middle-ground company. I am seeing the Verge article which states that their CEO has gone a little crazy over the use of AI and the wording makes me lose trust within it. Proton's whole point is security and yet it's having this, It has some stocks in non profit and is a swiss company. It shouldn't have been this way and would've been one of my least anticipated companies but I guess they want growth at all costs and the growth has been slightly lesser than expected and now they are burning the good-will in many ways.

I have to wonder that even if proton might have good engineers, then within this pressure by their CEO/CTO. I cannot trust the engineering talent because of these issues because they are very much forced by their company to use AI.

Proton is also really expensive.

Now just today, also, with a company so big as binance getting hacked and losing 6.5 Billion$. My trust within security just because its a large company is less.

On the other hand, I know a guy called Vikas on lowendtalk who operates his own mail platform called mailbig. I know he vibe-coded the landing page and might've vibe-coded something but it is really cheap. I also know francisco whom I have talked to who runs namecrane. (I think mailbig uses namecrane in many ways)

Perhaps E-mail can be a sensitive matter because you have to place trust in the provider even more because the protocol is not really that much secure but suppose it's an matrix instance (where it is genuinely encrypted) then that shifts it even further. I do trust NameCrane and NameBig from what I can gather.

I'd much rather support them and their cheaper deals than some other middle-corp. Sure some security factor can come in but also, the difference feels comparatively less and the balance has been made

The market will slightly squeeze as Hyperscalers will introduce the solutions of the middle-ground and the new players will everyday enter into the field with more competitive pricing just as well.

So in short, Enterprise will move towards the hyperscalers. Generic Consumers will move towards the cheapest option. The moat of the middle ground where UI/UX was the differentiator is being turned down. There would be some mix and match and there will be cost-savings for Enterprise to move from hyperscalers but it would depend on a lot of factors.