Lock-ins - anyone's friend?
No, not that type of lock-in.[1] I'm talking hear about the deliberate and/or thoughtless aspects of some software and hardware products.
There are some companies notable for a traditional approach to lock-in: the practice of using undocumented file formats and deprecating older formats. Autodesk famously do this with their AutoCAD product, changing formats as often as most people buy new shoes and dropping "save-as" support for older versions. Microsoft also do it, by changing their document formats, but also by having unpublished APIs on products and building software with the assumption that everything is or should be Microsoft. Most software companies in a dominant position in their market do it (if you know of exceptions, let me know). They do it to protect their immediate market at the expense of the their competitors and their customers.
Sometimes lock-in pretends to be your security friend: Bruce Schneier on lock-in.
But the consequence of lock-in is simple; slower innovation, increased costs and slower market growth. So companies practicing lock-in gain in the short-term but lose in the long-term through a smaller market. Everyone else just loses. So why do we stand for it? In IT probably habit, a case of just accepting that's the way it is. Or maybe the influence of the big organisations: those private sector behemoths that can afford it so don't bother to change and those, like councils, who are both highly resistant to change and have annual expenditure models (rather than three or five year) so don't see the change to be a saving. Then all those who deal with those organisations as suppliers and even customers are forced to adopt the same technologies to be able to interoperate. Raising everyone's costs in the process.
But we would all gain from more openness, a set of standards we interoperate with. The web has HTML, CSS and Javascript, which is starting to benefit us all. File formats still need some work, primarily of the civil protest variety; the formats exist but not enough is being done about the adoption of them.
[1] For the uninitiated or non-native English speakers, the phrase "lock-in" is often used to refer to the practice of closing a public house at the end of licenced hours with guests still inside, almost invariably limited to regular guests. Of course that kind of lock-in is also a form of protectionism as those locked-in won't be spending money anywhere else 
Posted at 10:15AM Nov 19, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Open Standards |