{"id":428,"date":"2006-06-18T11:40:08","date_gmt":"2006-06-18T17:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=428"},"modified":"2006-06-18T11:40:08","modified_gmt":"2006-06-18T17:40:08","slug":"why_do_you_thin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=428","title":{"rendered":"Why do you think they call it “lock-in”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dave Winer writes<\/a>, “The only criteria for winning that should be tolerated, by anyone, are features, performance and price. Lock-in is not an honorable or sustainable way to win.” I don’t think it’s that simple. It may not be honorable, but as far as “ways to win” go, lock-in is actually extraordinarily sustainable – much more so, in fact, than features, performance, and price, which all tend to get neutralized more quickly than lock-in does. Many of the greatest franchises in the history of the computer industry, from the IBM mainframe to Windows and Office to HP’s ink cartridges to eBay to the iPod and iTunes, have been sustained by lock-in. And that’s going to continue to be true. As Berkeley economists Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian have written<\/a>, “The ‘friction-free’ economy is a fiction; look for more lock-in, not less, as the information age progresses.” In many cases – though certainly not all – customers actually like to be locked in; it can make things simpler, and simpler, for most people, is better.<\/p>\n

Nothing lasts forever, of course, but if you’re looking for a durable business strategy, lock-in is mighty hard to beat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dave Winer writes, “The only criteria for winning that should be tolerated, by anyone, are features, performance and price. Lock-in is not an honorable or sustainable way to win.” I don’t think it’s that simple. It may not be honorable, but as far as “ways to win” go, lock-in is actually extraordinarily sustainable – much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}