Lecture
Vendor lock-in (also known as vendor lock-in, proprietary lock-in, customer lock-in, «barrier to switching suppliers») — a business model in which a consumer is made dependent on the products and services of a single supplier, with obstacles deliberately created to prevent switching suppliers because of the high cost of migration.
Suppliers have an interest in deliberately creating lock-in in order to capture a large market share, which sometimes leads to the emergence of monopolies and «de facto standards».
Both natural and deliberate lock-in can arise from the emergence of «de facto standards» that are incompatible with others, and ensuring compatibility with them turns out to be expensive, difficult, or impossible for competitors for licensing reasons.
Sometimes companies add their own extensions to open standards (whether useful, useless, or duplicating existing ones) without disclosing them or by patenting them. This tactic is called Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.
| Monopolistic | Collective | Common term |
|---|---|---|
| No | No | N / A |
| yes | Technology lock-in | |
| yes | No | Vendor lock-in |
| yes |
Monopolistic
Whether a single supplier controls the market for the method or technology to which one is locked in. It distinguishes lock-in to a plain technology from lock-in to its supplier in particular.
This class of lock-in is potentially technologically hard to overcome if the monopoly is protected by market barriers that are non-trivial to overcome, such as patents, secrecy, cryptography, or other technical obstacles.
Collective
Whether people are locked in together, partly through one another. From an economic standpoint, resisting the locally dominant choice is costly, as though it were due to friction between people. In a mathematical model of differential equations, disregarding the discreteness of individuals, this is a distributed-parameter system over market share, suitable for modeling with partial differential equations, such as the heat equation.
This class of lock-in is potentially unavoidable for rational people who are not otherwise motivated, since it creates a prisoner's dilemma - if the cost of resistance exceeds the cost of joining, then the locally optimal choice is to join - a barrier that requires cooperation to overcome. The distributive property (the cost of resisting the locally dominant choice) is not in itself a network effect, due to the absence of any positive feedback; however, adding bistability per individual, for example through switching costs, qualifies as a network effect, distributing this instability across the collective as a whole.
According to the definition by The Independent, this is a non-monopolistic (just technology), collective (at the societal level) type of lock-in:
Technology lock-in is the idea that the more a society adopts a particular technology, the less likely users are to switch away from it.
Examples:
Technology lock-in is, by definition, exclusively collective in nature. However, the personal variant is also a possible permutation of the options shown in the table, but without monopoly or collectivity it is expected to be the weakest lock-in. Equivalent personal examples:
There are lock-in situations that are both monopolistic and collective. Having the worst of both worlds, they can be very hard to get rid of - in many examples, the cost of resistance entails some level of isolation from (the dominant technology of) society, which can be socially costly, while at the same time compatibility prevents direct competition with the dominant supplier.
As one blogger put it:
If I stopped using Skype, I would lose contact with many people, because it's impossible to get them all to switch to [other] software.
Although MP3 is now unpatented, in 2001 it was both patented and entrenched, as Richard Stallman noted that same year (justifying the weak license for Ogg Vorbis):
there is […] a danger that people will settle on the MP3 format, even though it is patented, and that we will not be *allowed* to write free encoders for the most popular format. […] Usually, if someone decides not to use a copylefted program because they don't like the license, that's their loss, not ours. But if they reject the Ogg / Vorbis code because of the license and use MP3 instead, then the problem is shifted onto us, because their continued use of MP3 may help MP3 entrench itself and stay.
More examples:
AOL would occasionally change the ICQ protocol in incompatible ways, making it difficult to use «unofficial» clients such as Miranda and others. The «official» client exists only for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X . A beta version for Linux operating systems only appeared in May 2011 , and an ICQ client for phones and other J2ME-capable devices was not released until 2010.
Nearly all mobile devices use memory cards of the SD, miniSD, and microSD standards. However, Sony devices use flash memory of the Memory Stick standard, and a significant portion of Sony devices do not support other types of memory. Thus, having bought a Sony device, the buyer is forced to additionally purchase memory cards for it that are on average one and a half to two times more expensive than SD and, moreover, in most cases cannot be used with equipment they already own.
To overcome vendor lock-in, third-party manufacturers have created SD-to-Memory Stick adapters. For example, for the PSP there is an inexpensive adapter housed in a standard Memory Stick form factor that allows two MicroSD cards to be used simultaneously, thereby obtaining a capacity of 64 GB.
Microsoft's FAT family of file systems is the standard or de facto standard for many storage media that must be accessible from multiple operating systems, with the exception of optical discs. Full or substantial FAT support exists in most operating systems, unlike other file systems supported by Microsoft Windows — the most widespread PC operating systems — with the exception of the UDF file system. Many compact mobile devices such as cameras support only FAT16 or FAT32. The Secure Digital SD card standard uses FAT12 and FAT16, while SDHC uses FAT32.
Although such media can be used with better file systems, FAT is often used by default, and it may be preferred for compatibility with devices that support (including because of the SD standards) only it.
The standard file system for SDXC cards is exFAT. It was designed specifically for flash drives and surpasses FAT in technical characteristics, but documentation for implementing it was available only under an agreement with Microsoft , and for a long time exFAT support in Linux-kernel operating systems was limited.[10][11] However, in June 2013 the source code of the exFAT driver was leaked[12], developed and used by Samsung in its mobile devices. It was subsequently established that it contained code from the Linux kernel, and in August 2013 the company was forced to open-source the driver under the GPL v2 license[13].
In addition, Microsoft holds patents related to exFAT and some elements of FAT,[14] and charges royalties for file system support.[15]
Cameras have only three open standards for accessories: the ¼-inch tripod screw, the hot shoe, and the M42 thread. But the latter two standards are limited in capability — they have no control over aperture, focusing, or the flash guide number. Therefore, different manufacturers make their own formats for lenses, flashes, and remote shutter releases, and when switching manufacturers you have to replace all the accessories (except perhaps the tripod).
There are all kinds of lens adapters that are quite cheap — many times less than a good lens. They are widely used for mounting lenses from the «pre-digital» era on modern cameras — although focusing or automatic aperture control on them often works with limitations.
The Microsoft Word word processor and the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet processor, part of the Microsoft Office suite, for many years[16] saved documents by default in a format whose description could only be obtained for money and under a non-disclosure agreement, which hindered the implementation of quality support for this format in competing programs. Later the terms of access to the description changed, but the question arose of whether they are suitable for free software, which does not accept patent restrictions. These new terms also apply to a new format based on the previous ones — made an ISO and Ecma standard shortly after ISO and OASIS adopted a less controversially open analogue.[17]
Microsoft provides a Windows program, «Microsoft Office Word Viewer», which allows viewing files in Word formats. With Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003 you are only permitted to view and print documents.[18]
Ten years later, Microsoft Office Word 2007 Service Pack 2 provides incomplete[19] support for the open .odf format, and OpenOffice.org implements limited support for the .docx format, «native» to Microsoft Word 2007.
The Skype protocol is closed, which leads to the near-total impossibility of developing unofficial clients.
With the Skype protocol, vendor lock-in was implemented twice: first the closed Skype protocol was the property of the Skype company, which completely ruled out the development of alternative clients; then Skype was bought by Microsoft, which, as part of its Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish strategy, first offered its own, less convenient client, and then shut down the authentication servers for the old clients, despite the fact that they themselves are still fully functional and contain everything needed for almost decentralized communication.
To top it off, Microsoft centralized Skype communication. All messages now pass through Microsoft's servers rather than being transmitted directly from client to client.
Lossily compressed data may be disadvantageously converted into another format: this will lead either to an increase in its size or to further losses.[20] One has to maintain compatibility with the format used to compress the data, even though decoding from this format (as with various MPEG formats) or distributing data in it (as was at least planned for H.264) may be subject to patent royalties.
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