Defenestration 101.03

What Is Vendor Lock-in?

One of the worst things that could happen to you as a supplier of goods and services is for the customer to leave you for one of your competitors. You can prevent this by providing a service nobody else provides, by offering unrivaled quality or service, or by charging a price that is hard for others to match. You can also combine these methods of keeping a customer, and you can raise customer awareness by marketing and advertising your offering.

Another tactic is to find ways to prevent or discourage your client from switching even if he or she wants to. In other words, you can try to lock the client in. You can do this with service contracts that contain cancellation fees. Sometimes, a client locks him or herself by committing to a platform or product by writing code.

If I build my business on an in-house software solution that uses an Oracle database, I may do the work such that it is difficult and costly to switch to a different database product. If Oracle changes their terms of service, or raises the cost in some way, it may be cheaper for me to pay this cost or accept the service changes than it would be to change the application so that it works with a different database product. In this case, I have locked myself in.

If my needs are such that I can depend on the MySQL database, I am free to run my database on Linux, Windows, or some other operating system. My choice of MySQL does not lock me into using the Windows OS. However, if I want to use SQL Server, I will also need to buy a Windows license. Another way to lock you in is to provide products that depend on each other and to force clients to use one if they want to use the other.

Another way to lock you in has been to provide a software product that uses proprietary file formats or closed APIs. This makes it hard to switch to a new product without converting you old files, or rewriting your code. It is in your best interests to support open file formats, and open APIs.

For more information about vendor lock-in see:

• The Linux Information Project.
• Norwegian minister: closed formats, vendor lockin are unacceptable
• The Advantage of Adopting Open Source Software

Oppose Vendor Lock-in

Some people may argue that some of the practices I have described here are wrong or immoral. I won’t argue that. If you are willing to allow yourself to get locked in, then I suppose I will have to admit that the practices I describe are smart – I wouldn’t say the same thing about you.

As a consumer, you should want to preserve your ability to switch to a competing product. If something better than comes along, you want to be able to consider lowering your cost or improving the quality or performance of the software you use. In software, innovation is encouraged by openness and by collaboration more than it is by monopoly practices.

Defenestration is about putting you in the drivers seat. It is about encouraging innovation, choice and competition.