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

This has *always* been the case...

[wandazulu]

Per the article, sure, you can switch to a Pepsi in a second if you don't like the Coke, but both Pepsi and Coke spend *enormous* amounts of money to suggest that switching to the competitor's product will make you less desirable to women, less success at your job, etc. That's what advertising is all about, trying to get you to lock *yourself* in, willingly, to a single product.

But I digress...

Everybody dreams of being Ma Bell, where even putting a plastic cone on a headset could "damage the network". A lot of companies have had their turn too. We all think of Microsoft as being the king of lock-in, but for my money, it would still be IBM, where their mainframes and mid-range machines were so locked down that you had to get approval to install *anything*. At least with a PC or even a Mac, you can install another OS and you're free and clear. With IBM equipment, they could shut you down remotely if you missed a single "usage" payment (which was calculated *by* *the* *processor* *cycle*!!).

I cannot think of a single company that wouldn't want total lock-in of its users, regardless of industry. Some are just more capable of doing it than others.

Re:Monopoly is the goal of capitalism

[kidcharles]

"But that's not good for capitalism, so it isn't the goal of capitalism!" while sitting on Mommy's lap or at Mommy's Marxist University Actually the tendency for capitalism to eat itself alive with its drive for monopolization is accepted in and is part of Marxist economic theory. Another contradiction of capitalism that is an observation in Marxist theory is the desire of an individual firm to pay its employees as little as possible, but that depends on well-paid consumers having enough money to buy their products. That's my personal favorite.

Re:As in...Lock-in Backfires

[Technician]

Lock-in is anything that creates barriers to moving to a competitor.

Often lock-in is the driving force to open standards and the proprietary vendors have to change or die. The most recent example of this that I can point to is the theatrical lighting industry. Martin, Strand, MSI, and other inteligent lighting manufactures all had their own standard for running lighting. Touring companies found it difficult to interface with all the lighting systems. A committie was formed to produce a standard that wasn't any of the already established standards to avoid any patent and royalty bias toward any one manufacture.

The birth of the DMX-512 standard came out. Now it is almost impossible to sell any lighting system that doesn't support the standard.

http://www.usitt.org/standards/DMX512.html
"This standard is intended to provide for interoperability at both communication and mechanical levels with controllers made by different manufacturers."

Almost everything now uses the new standard from Drama, Dance, and Club Nightlife. If you buy an intelligeht moving light, It's almost guaranteed to use the DMX-512 signal, even if the connector isn't the standard 5 pin XLR. An exception to the DMX standard is the one for architectural using multiple wall stations for building lights. Even these control systems often output DMX-512 signals to use standard dimmers.

In some specialty fields some still try with something other than the standard. As an example the animated Christmas lights often use the Lights-o-Rama system which is incompatible with everything else.

http://www.lightorama.com/

It is a cheaper alternative with a lower cost per dimmer, but it is limited to dimmers only. It won't run all the disco and concert moving color changing lights. And of course you can only use their software and interface to run the dimmers.