It is about the way technologies get hyped and over-sold and over-promised, and then made unusably complicated. In the excellent book "Antipatterns," I recall

It is about the way technologies get hyped and over-sold and over-promised, and then made unusably complicated. In the excellent book "Antipatterns," I recall that this is called a "Wolf Ticket:" Wolf Ticket is a product that claims openness and conformance to standards that have no enforceable meaning. The products are delivered with proprietary interfaces that may vary significantly from the published standard. http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/wolf-ticket http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/wolf-ticket Wolf tickets are sold as safe choices because of their interoperability, but of course once you have anything non-trivial built upon them, you discover that the interoperability doesn't actually work and you are left locked into your vendor.