Kind of a tangent, but a lot of brick and mortar business is far less profitable than most think. A McDonalds franchise owner is looking at ~$150k/year profit on average. And with lots of other fun stuff like the fact you don't even own the property, it's rented from McDonalds. And that's going to likely trend downward as McDonalds continues to put the squeeze on franchisees and labor costs continue to rise.

And far from passive income, there's a joke that buying a franchise is basically buying a job and not just any job - but a stressful, thankless job with terrible working hours. And the price tag for this new life of luxury starts at around a million dollars.

I like your argument, but McDonald's gets their ingredients from multiple suppliers, all selected for their specific specialism.

They also don't run the cash registers on software provided by their meat supplier.

In Dutch government (especially local), for example, almost everything runs on Microsoft. From e-mail to web sites to chat to internal software. And with AI coming up, Microsoft is effortlessly capturing that market too by including Copilot in existing contracts.