Talk:Vendor lock-in

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[edit] Lock-in versus "Razor/Razor Blade"

There seems to be confusion in the article regarding a lock-in versus the Razor blade business approaches.

As the introduction states, lock-in is where you create a cost barrier to leave a system. This is different than what happens with razor blades and printers. In both of those examples, the non-consumable is often very inexpensive and the company profits from the sale of consumable parts. To ensure the original company receives the profits from consumable sales, they use a proprietary approach to exclude others.

However, this is often not lock-in because the cost to change, especially in the razor and printer examples, is limited to the new inexpensive non-consumable (and any unused, proprietary consumables left at the time of change).

In the main article, I would like to add a section which mentioned the differences between Lock-in and Razor and blades with a link to that other article, and remove the printer example. What does everyone think? 216.148.248.31 20:10, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

That's an excellent idea. The Ikea mattress size issue is a nice counter example, so is just about any discussion of consumer electronics and batteries. RossPatterson 23:25, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, although I don't follow with the Ikea mattress. In editing the article, and the addition of the connector conspiracy section, I've tried to show how sometimes its lock-in, and sometimes its razor blade.

[edit] "Connector Conspiracy"

From what I understand, connector conspiracy is forcing someone to replace all of their accessories when they upgrade the core system by changing all the connectors to those accessories for the new model. This doesn't seem to be lock-in; in fact, it has the opposite effect in that people won't want to upgrade because they can't reuse the components.

Although having typed that I can see how it can be lock-in; if you create a device with all proprietary connectors (so that everyone else's connectors can't match yours), then if someone wants to switch to a competitor they will have to buy all new accessories (hence, a higher cost to switch).

I'm going to add a new section and detail this, if thats ok Davandron | Talk 02:33, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

connector conspiracy used to be a separate article, but got deleted. It should be explained that the phrase is a hacker joke that implies collusion among manufacturers to use incompatible connectors on hardware cables and boards, as if at some secret cabal meeting Sun would say "we'll use the db-50" and IBM would say "OK, modified CN-50 for us!" .
This is certainly not limited to upgrades within a manufacturer's offerings, nor to intentional vendor lock-in; it also includes unintentional vendor lock-in. Additionally, in most cases, you weren't actually locked in, you simply needed to buy or make an adapter. There were probably at least a half-dozen incompatible connectors for scsi-1 because the standards process wasn't coherent; everyone implemented their own way, and some used certain connectors because they were cheaper, or smaller, or resembled something they were already using somewhere else. In computer circles, I've most often heard it referred to with regard to actual cable and board connectors; printer ink is intentional vendor lock-in in a razor-and-blade model fashion, and not really quite the same thing. I'll mod the article a bit to include above. -- Akb4 03:43, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What about Apple?

It is a truly vendor lock-in:

Apple Hardware and Apple Software (Mac OS X) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ajoe (talk • contribs) 2005-02-13 03:32:46

Yes possibly, but lock in usually only matters much if the vendor has market power or the ability to influence the whole market. Apple has well less than 5% market share (often estimated now at about 3% actually), so they really can't exert much market power. - Taxman 17:34, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
Matters to whom? If you are Apple, or someone who has a $30k piece of equipment that will only work with a mac, it matters to you a great deal. An economist's view of the entire computer industry is a pretty high-level perspective to take, and one that may be entirely irrelevant to companies and customers "on the ground". akb4 5 May 2006
The apple lock-in case is more egregious in the area of digital music, where Apple is estimated to handle over 80% of the market for online music sales and over 90% of the market of music players. I have added information on an ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Apple, I hope that it should prove enough to keep the section. --DDG 22:18, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
I think the digital music paragraph is well worth keeping. What I can’t see the value of is the hardware and software which User:P0lyglut keeps adding. I don’t understand how Apple hardware and software (except for the iPod) is any different from every other computer company which makes hardware and/or software. e.g. Why not list the GIMP? They deliberately keep the .xcf format hidden (for their own valid reasons), therefore locking you in. Barefootguru 02:43, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
You mean this format: XCF (file format) "Thus the source code of the Gimp itself (which is freely available) is the reference documentation of the format." --unsigned
The article is missing an important distinguisher; we don't talk about intentional vs. non-intentional lock-in, nor about the feature differences. For example, you could say Apple's use of the 3.5" floppy was lock-in, but they used it not because they wanted lock-in, but because it was higher capacity, faster, and smaller. And they didn't even invent the sucker, they just bought it from Sony.
MacDraw and MacWrite are a different matter entirely from iLife. When they were released there were dozens of similar programs none of which could interoperate, and a plethora of types of disk drive and filesystem formats as well. MacWrite files are no more locked in than Bank Street Writer or PFS or XYwrite; certainly someone who used a word processor that was only available on an Amiga or Atari ST was just as locked in, and folks who used dedicated machines like CPT, Exxon Qyx, or Wang word processors were even more locked in. This section is totally without historical perspective in that Apple's designs and behavior were no different from anyone else's at the time (at least until one gets to the "look and feel" lawsuits, and those are only slightly lock-in related). In many lock-in cases, it actually costs the manufacturer money in r&d, custom tooling and skills to create lock-in, but in the computer industry of the 1980s, it was the other way around: interoperability cost extra money, and in many cases couldn't really be achieved -- if there are no standards, you can't adhere to them.
Even now, GUI-based programs are locked to platform-specific GUI libraries. This is not because of intentional lock-in, it's more like differences in railway gauge; the nature of the beast is that if you write a program with the win32 gui API, you're basically locked into using on a Microsoft OS; it will be a kludge at best under any other system. Ditto for X11, Gnome, OS/2, Cocoa, Quickdraw, whatever.
In terms of iLife, I thought that was a suite, not a program? Doesn't it include iTunes, GarageBand, etc? iTunes can import music in several non-proprietary formats and except for DRM export it in readable ways as well. I think I'm gonna edit the computer section a lot; I don't know enough to know if the business professor's definition of lock-in includes intention, but it's hardly Original Research to note that it's unclear what avoiding lock-in would look like... I'm certainly locked in to my auto manufacturer for most parts, but it would be very difficult to have multiple car manufacturers making different models if this was not the case... -- Akb4 05:31, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
There are several examples, actually, that I remember from my Mac days in the early '90s. 1) Floppy disks, as mentioned; 2) ADB keyboards/mice (when everyone else started using PS/2 style; 3) Monitors are VGA but use a different connector (I made a converter for this once); 4) Modems use serial protocol, but don't use RS-232 DB-25 or DB-9 like the rest of the world; 5) Ethernet uses AAUI connector -- there is such a thing as AUI, which is a connector to more popular media, no doubt the same thing, but it has a different connector; 6) they used SCSI drives, thankfully mostly with standard connectors, but everything else that wasn't a server or a high-end workstation used IDE; 7) Localtalk, which was cheap but was a bow-wow and nobody else used it; 8) they always used serial printers and had funny cables, not parallel printers. The use of proprietary components instead of widely-available, industry standard parts drove up the cost of the Macs back in the days when they were rapidly losing market share.
I might also add that IBM shot themselves in the foot with MCA architecture and not providing legacy ISA buses in their PS/2 series. When PCI came out, the early MBs always had a free ISA slot or two. That would have been the better way to go. Afalbrig 10:49, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Is lock-in "bad"?

The article seems to assume, or at least imply, that vendor lock-in is somehow bad, an evil tactic, a problem to be combated. Is this bias intended? Is it right? --Franck 14:06, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Well bad is certainly not correct. It does reduce consumer choice and raise prices, so the consumer utility is lower and the producer's is higher. Is that bad? Well some POV's would certainly say so, but others would not I guess. To be NPOV the article should not reflect one side or the other, simply describe. I see upon re-reading that you are right. There are some POV words in there like combating, and the second half of the article doesn't seem entirely NPOV. See what you can do to make it more neutral without removing correct information. - Taxman 15:39, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Java

From the current version of the article:

Sun Microsystems' unwillingness to open Java to external standardization bodies and the lack of multiple competing Java runtime implementations is widely held to be the reason Java has failed on the desktop.

I dispute the facts of this statement. First, I'm not convinced Java has failed on the desktop. As I write this, the most popular download from SourceForge is a desktop program written in Java (Azureus). And it's been in that position for several months, I believe. Secondly, I'd suggest the primary reason for Java's difficulty penetrating the desktop market is that it is quite difficult to use it to produce a professional-looking GUI. Java applications typically look "wrong", and feel sluggish. Thirdly, there are multiple competing JRE implementations. It's just that Sun's typically leads the others in terms of new features by a significant margin. Also, who holds this opinion? I've only heard it from a minority of politically-motivated free software advocates.

Should the sentence be deleted, or rephrased to take into account these objections? —Preceding unsigned comment added by JulesH (talk • contribs) 16:07, 9 July 2005


This sentence must be deleted. Java is not an example of Vendor lock in. Java is the exact opposite of Vendor lock in (remember multi platform?). The purpose of Java is to prevent Vendor lockin. Also Java is alive and well on the desktop, it has a very rich and powerful GUI, and outperforms other desktop programming languages I could mention. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.156.248.138 (talk • contribs) 08:07, 14 January 2006

[edit] Comparison with lock-ins

Removed the first paragrah: In the British Isles, the term lock-in refers to an illegal gathering in a pub after the hours during which alcohol may be legally sold, where the landlord locks his guests in, dims lights and draws curtains to avoid the attention of the police.

That doesn't make sense in this article -- it refers to illicit after-hours drinking, while the article refers to the use of network-effect to prevent competition. Ojw 12:14, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

um, sounds like it needs a disambiguation page, not deletion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.160.128.228 (talk • contribs) 19:50, 5 May 2006

You save Java has failed on the desktop? This is just not true, I spent the last 3 years writing a Java desktop program. Java is a powerful and viable desktop solution. Java is not a good example of Vendor lock in. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.156.248.138 (talk • contribs) 08:03, 14 January 2006

[edit] List of non-open formats?

Would there be a need to create an article listing all non-open format which target a Pottersville pattern? Like listing at one place the Windows API, the AIM protocol, Apple's Fairplay, Skype etc.? Peter S. 16:49, 10 November 2005 (UTC), 21:06, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

If you can define all the ways in which something could be non-open. And that could be quite a lot, and it would be a permute, not a hierarchy; ie, foo is documented but patent-encumbered, while bar is undocumented but not patent encumbered, while baz is documented but chipset-specific. An API and a format are radically different things, and a format and a network protocol while not wholly dissimilar are certainly no-where near the same thing. I suppose you could list every file format and API ever and then figure out a taxonomy for the ways in which they are open and not open. All in all, this is a monumental task to perform in an NPOV fashion. -- Akb4 05:39, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bias in reference links?

It seems odd to me that at the end of a page giving an overview of Vendor Lock-in that there are 5 refeence links, 3 of which are by the same pair of economists, who basically disagree with everything on the page. They're famous for arguing that the best technology won out in VHS vs. Betamax and Dvork vs QWERTY keyboards (i.e. disputing classic examples of lock-in), but that just reflects their general belief that market forces always produce the best result. Such views are popular in certain economic/political circles but don't seem like mainstream thought to me (speaking as an economics graduate from the UK). Their view that Microsoft wasn't a damaging monopoly abuser of lock-in is not a generally accepted concept, for example.

If the links are to remain it would be better if there was a section for criticism of 'vendor lock-in' where the arguments against 'vendor lock-in' could be presented, and perhaps more than one pair of researchers can be found that argue this point. [2006-02-13 00:17:30 86.17.163.244]

[edit] Standard English please

Please could someone edit the sentence "At the time Apple was stated to have an 80% market share of digital music sales and a 90% share of sales of new music players, which he claimed allowed Apple to horizontally leverage its dominant positions in both markets to lock consumers into its complementary offerings." to avoid the nonsensical phrase "horizontally leverage"? "Leverage" is not a verb and makes no sense in this context. I would edit it myself but I haven't got a clue what it means. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pigeon.dyndns.org (talk • contribs) 19:10, 27 March 2006

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=leverage —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.175.20.66 (talk • contribs) 02:16, 1 April 2006
the above link explains the usage in the article, but whoever placed it here didn't mention that. I do think that link makes it clear that to a business person, horizontal leverage is a well understood concept, so we shoud prolly just remove this whole subsection, but I'm a newbie and don't know etiquette for that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.160.128.228 (talk • contribs) 19:54, 5 May 2006

[edit] Ikea Mattress Sizes

Ikea making mattresses a funny size to force you to buy linen from them is a myth. In fact Ikea make mattresses to European sizes- I live in the UK and have an Ikea bed, and can buy linen anywhere I please. They are just non standard if you are in America.

Also, I read that :http://www.mbajungle.com/magazine.cfm?INC=inc_article.cfm&artid=2110&template=1 Ikea have changed in the US to US bed sizes. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.148.180.5 (talk • contribs) 18:06, 21 October 2006

I am in the UK, and own several beds from Ikea, with Ikea mattresses, and can confirm that the mattresses I own do not match fitted bed linen from the vast majority of other suppliers, including, but not limited to, Marks & Spencer and Argos. The standard length for an Ikea single or double bed is 200cm ( 78" ), while the standard length for a UK single or double bed is 75". Only when you reach king-size are lengths compatible, but then widths become incompatible - a UK standard king-size bed is 60" ( 152cm ) wide, but Ikea king-size mattresses are either 140cm or 160cm wide. You can check for yourself by comparing the figures quoted on the Ikea corporate website with the list of standard mattress sizes located here: http://www.csgnetwork.com/bedsizes.html
With this in mind, I'm restoring my earlier comments about vendor lock-in. WMMartin 17:45, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
Again, I doubt that this is lock in, they just produce the same bed for all markets - they don't even change names across the regions. It might be that having to by bed linen from them is a side-effect they like, but if it was their primary concern, they would start selling US- or UK-sized mattresses in Europe. But since they sell the standard European size there (their largest market), the only reason that they don't sell local sizes elsewhere is that they want to produce one product only... I think this should be removed, it is an unfair assumption that doesn't withstand a closer look Quark999 15:45, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
If you check Ikea's website for Canada/US, the mattress sizes are the King/Queen/Full/Twin that are usual in North America, so it does sound like the UK is simply too small a market for Ikea to specialize their products for. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.58.12.46 (talk) 23:07, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] intro para getting a little long ;; break out into 'examples' section?

who wants to have a go at this. drefty.mac 01:20, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

I'll take a stab at it Davandron | Talk 01:40, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
I re-organized the article, adding subsections and relocating much of the material from the top into the article itself. Hopefully, the header to the article is now a "quick answer" with the details and examples below (in the article itself). Davandron | Talk 02:25, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Category for non-interoperable systems / Vendor-lock in?

Do you think it would help to have a category identifying Category:Non-interoperable systems? The issue is being voted on, please contribute your vote / opinion: here. Pgr94 23:36, 7 February 2007 (UTC)


[edit] The title should be Customer lock-in

I think that the most of the text means customer lock-in nor vendor lock-in.

--JiE 13:31, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Other examples

Is the Nespresso patented coffee-capsule technology suitable as example of vendor lock-in?

Only one brand of coffee (Nestlé) is allowed in the machines using this technology (see Nespresso#Criticism for details).

Maroual (talk) 12:27, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Firefox + QuickTime example

"Therefore, buying an iPod means that your Firefox choices are taken away, even though the use case of Firefox is completely unrelated to the use case of an iPod."


As far as I know, users can still change the player used for MP3 files in Firefox's preferences? i.e., they're not locked-in, they can easily switch to another media player?

If that was lock-in, then surely every application which changes your computer to make certain file types "Always Open With" that application would also be an example of lock-in?! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dasequeltocow (talk • contribs) 18:46, 23 May 2008 (UTC)