Bruce Schneier Weighs in on IT Lock-in Strategies

dhavleak writes "Wired has an article from Bruce Schneier on the intersection of security technologies and vendor lock-ins in IT. 'With enough lock-in, a company can protect its market share even as it reduces customer service, raises prices, refuses to innovate and otherwise abuses its customer base. It should be no surprise that this sounds like pretty much every experience you've had with IT companies: Once the industry discovered lock-in, everyone started figuring out how to get as much of it as they can.'"

Comments

Symantec

[QuantumRiff]

Is the freaking worst. We finally switched when their AV client, sitting idle on a PC that was just booted, was using 50MB of RAM. (Some of our systems only had 256 at the time). Over 4 years, our renewal costs (we're a school), went from $5/machine to $18/machine. We still use ghost, and have not seem one damn improvement in the last 4 years, even though it has gone through all sorts of different versions. (now using Ghost solution suite 2.0) I don't see any difference in the software. dear god, you would think they would use WinPE by now, and stop breaking up Ghost images into 2GB chunks. I guess 2 years ago they fixed some multicast issues. Thats it. We just moved from Backup Exec 9.1 to Backup Exec 11d (We had starting using when it was Veritas), mainly for tape encryption capabilities. Of course, it is working fairly well, unless I do something crazy Like try to encrypt our backups to tape. I sat on hold for 45 minutes yesterday, and gave up.. They just bought Altiris, which is who we were looking at to switch to from Ghost. GRRR.. They just buy companies, and then raise prices..

Re:Build-your-own systems are starting to look goo

[webmaster404]

Hmm? I highly doubt that any computer maker will lock you into hardware/software it just is bad business. Think of Dell, Vista failed, people started to not buy computers so they switched to letting people use XP, enough people wrote in and now they offer Linux, the hardware companies just want to sell hardware, if they can get that by offering Vista they will, if enough people request Linux they will offer that. Most hardware manufacturers want their product to be used as much as possible, if that means using standards they will (and mostly have) use it to get people to buy it. We are far away from computers (laptop and desktops not PDAs and Cell Phones and such) that have hardware/software lockin and the only one to have done it was Apple however now they let even Windows boot on Macs. The fact is, hardware manufacturers don't care about locking you into software, they just want money, if they can get that by offering MS, Linux, or whatever they will so lockin is a bad choice for them.

Re:This is true, but on the other hand

[rkanodia]

This isn't always true. For many users, the pain of proprietary file formats is not understood until well after the purchase.

There's not a single new thing about lock-in

[postbigbang]

Just some things that are more onerous than others. This has been going on since the beginning of the industry, and it won't change. You can complain about it all you want, but it's going to continue to happen.

Everyone wants a revenue stream not a revenue pond.

That doesn't justify boorish behavior, but it explains how companies want to stay in existence, and few other models exist that allow them to do this. Once again, Bruce thinks we were born yesterday.

Re:This is true, but on the other hand

[idontgno]

Tell it to street-level drug pushers. They mastered lock-in decades ago. It's only recently that tech marketing has risen to the level of "The first taste is free, baby!"

Re:Be Creative!

[trolltalk.com]

"Windows, like a newspaper, only has value in context and for a limited time. Your old copy of MSDOS is worthless today as are most of every copy of software you have released before 2001. It only had value in context and the sooner you lose that context the better off you are."

It still does whatever you had to do in times past. For example, SimCity 4 runs fine on Windows 98. A lot of places refuse to dump their Win2k setups, or they have software that still requires DOS.

Heck, I know one place that runs their financials on a Win 3.1 program. Its been doing everything they need for 15 years, and they're not going to change. It works, it runs fine under xp, and why fix what ain't broke?

Re:As in...

[bigstrat2003]

There are perfectly good reasons to hate universal health care and Social Security apart from supposed hatred of poor people. Not all of us trust the government to be a good provider, and want the ability to opt out of a bad system. Social Security is an even better example. If I believe that Social Security is going to collapse before I can benefit (I have no opinion on the matter, for the record, as I lack sufficient information), why the hell would I want pay into such a thing?

Not everyone who wants a free market is doing it for the evil reasons you paint, and not everyone who doesn't want the programs you mention is a greedy bastard who wants to be better than poor people.

Re:They said the same thing about cell phone numbe

[suckmysav]

Yeah, sure. What you are suggesting is that I should be able to move house from one country/city/town/suburb but still be able to receive the mail sent to my old home address*. It's an utterly retarded idea.

When you use an @domain symbol your dns server directs the query to the server that is responsible for that domain. ie, the server operated by (or on behalf of) the owner of the domain.

If you want email portability then you can register your own domain . It's really quite simple.

If you don't want to do that then guess what, you can get an email address on somebody elses domain. If you choose to move from their domain you don't retain any rights to continue using a domain name that you don't own

How is that difficult to understand?

Honestly, sometimes I think we need a better class of geeks on slashdot. Is Digg down at the moment?

* Yes, I realise that you can do a temporary mail redirect but this costs money and is very resource intensive. If *everyone* tried to do this in perpetuity then the system would be completely unworkable, both logistically as well as inuitively.