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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.'"
Nope.
Lock-in is anything that creates barriers to moving to a competitor. For example, file formats. Or email address non-portability between different ISPs (or freemail providers, for that matter). Or (in the case of telecoms) number non-portability.The subscription model is one of the ways to milk extra bucks from lock-in, but it isn't itself a "lock-in."
Kevin Smith on Prince
http://www.opencores.org/
As far as the cost of getting one of those built, I'd like to know that myself... Reminds me when I was part of the crew dismantling the old fabs responsible for the Z80... Shoulda paid one of the drivers to deliver one of those Canon machines to my garage...
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
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..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Don't stop at the processor level. The fundamental laws of physics already contain signs of corporate lock-in. The No-cloning feature of quantum mechanics clearly is a sign of DRM built into the fundamental laws of the universe. And the inner workings of about everything we use is tied to the exact laws of the universe we are in. Therefore you have to start at the very beginning: First build your own universe!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's completely wrong! A lock-in is when the consumer is "stuck" with a particular vendor. This may be due to any number of things, but subscription is not one of them. A subscription-based service only locks you in if it makes unsubscribing difficult (which may translate to costly), which has nothing to do with being a subscription-based service in the first place.
A company that runs on a subscription-based business model would *benefit* from lock-in (to keep subscriptions going), but it doesn't have to do it. Magazines don't lock you in, neither do websites with subscription-based access (e.g. IGN, or newspapers), etc. You're always free to cancel and subcribe to something else if you wish.
I like basketball!!1!
This isn't always true. For many users, the pain of proprietary file formats is not understood until well after the purchase.
I really don't think you should be talking about Bruce Schneier like that when you clearly know nothing about the man. For example, did you know that Bruce Schneier once decrypted a box of Alpha Bits? Or that he knows the state of Schroedinger's cat? It's true!
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.
I built my own universe once, but the startup Bang really hosed up my wife's microwave.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
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.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Where did you get this information? Quantum mechanics tells us that Bruce Schneier cannot be observed directly.....
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.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
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.
The truth shall set you free!