3 ms·

I think many people coming up these days never really felt the effects of Vendor Lock-in. Everything is either an open enough standard or dominated so thoroughl

I think many people coming up these days never really felt the effects of Vendor Lock-in. Everything is either an open enough standard or dominated so thoroughly by one player that there is no option anyway. I remember my printer not working, and saving my report that I wrote in MS Works on a floppy disk. I assumed that the computers at school would be able to read it. They had Word Perfect, and MS Word, I mean one was the same vendor, and it still didn't work. That was over 20 years ago, but I still cringe whenever I see someone using any kind of closed standard. The idea of starting out with a single provider until you actually have things working is probably a good idea. But, I'm surprised that more companies with a certain level of steady traffic don't run their own hardware and spillover to the cloud for spikes.

titanix2 8y ago
Open standards doesn’t magically solve compatibility issues for very complex software: I remember ODT files having their layout completely messed up when opening them with a different version of Open Office. And this was minor version changes, not major ones. I had way less problem with modern variant of MS Word. That being said, I’m all for open formats.
- dec0dedab0de 8y ago
  Open standards doesn’t magically solve compatibility issues for very complex software: I remember ODT files having their layout completely messed up when opening them with a different version of Open Office. And this was minor version changes, not major ones. I had way less problem with modern variant of MS Word. That being said, I’m all for open formats. Absolutely. The major difference is that one is a technical challenge, and the other was a marketing decision.