Comments on: You Can’t Stop Lock-In, You Can Only Hope to Contain It

By: Johannes Ernst

Johannes Ernst — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:36:00 +0000

Seems to me that if a product A didn’t have any lock-in, it would have to be identical to a product B. (Otherwise there’d be a feature in A without an equivalent in B i.e. lock-in). Or a clean subset, in which case B would have lock-in.

No lock-in’s would mean a fully commoditized market with no differentiators and innovation would be at a standstill, which would clearly be worse than lock-in. So limiting the amount of lock-in seems to be the only reasonable way out, as you suggest.

By: james governor

james governor — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:23:13 +0000

timely piece stephen. i have been thinking about the cloud, and the “need for open source standards” as Simon Wardley puts it. I am not so sure. It seems to me we’ve never hard a computing wave where customers didn’t anoint a *hopefully* benign dictator (they never really are!) to package a set of standards and add extensions to create a computing experience that works for the mainstream. It seems to me deeply ironic that today many of those geeks who proclaim themselves to be holders of the the open flame are jumping straight into Apple’s warm, closed, embrace. The Apple experience is amazing, computer, iPod, phone – but its certainly not open.

By: josephmartins

josephmartins — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:50:27 +0000

Solid advice Stephen. I wrote an interesting little piece about lock-in earlier this year…specifcally about how lock-in is used by development teams as a bogeyman to gather support for internal development projects.

But lock-in will only worsen with time. Systems tend to become more complex, not less, over time regardless the development platform, architecture or source (bought versus built).

Decisions made today can and will have a long-lasting impact.