Comments on: Do enterprises treat lock-ins differently from consumers?

By: David Upton

David Upton — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 09:21:20 +0000

Goes against all the laws of economics, doesn’t it? I can have Linux free, but pay through the nose for Windows, etc. Why did I bother reading Samuelson?
I think the corporate reason for accepting lock-ins is timidity. No-one wants to make the decision to go with another system which sounds somehow ‘experimental’ and ‘geeky’, when there’s all those ads out there telling you how good Microsoft is, and everyone else is using it.
And secondly – sorry to say this on a (ex?) CIO’s blog – for many of our clients (we’re an SME, they’re huge) the dead hand of the corporate IT department, and its long list of worthy requirements and internal procedures, is the greatest lock-in of all.
A FTSE 100 company once paid us to write a simple external website for them, for specialised internal communications. We did it in a week, using a popular cheap templating package. (In effect, it’s a group blog). Their IT department had quoted them 12 to 18 months to do the same thing on their intranet.

By: John Dodds

John Dodds — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 15:23:08 +0000

It’s not just the provenance of the expenditure that matters – it’s the number of users who’ll feel the impact that matters. The greater that number, the more disruption does the purchaser imagine will ensue (rightly or wrongly) and thus the lock-in represents the path of least resistance.

By: Don Marti

Don Marti — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 04:50:33 +0000

If you’re choosing technology for yourself, lock-in affects the media collection that you hope to have 20 years from now. If you’re choosing technology for a company, lock-in affects the poor bastard who takes over the job you hope not to have two years from now.