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Exactly. A lot of Apple's big announcements today were about features that create lock-in. Your music is tied to a $25 iTunes subscriptions; your reading list,

Exactly. A lot of Apple's big announcements today were about features that create lock-in. Your music is tied to a $25 iTunes subscriptions; your reading list, email, calendar, to do list, and office documents are tied to iCloud; they even want your text messaging tied to your iOS devices. Then there's all those apps you bought on the Mac and iOS App Stores that you'll never be able to transfer to another system. If you start using enough of these new features, switching away to Android, WebOS or Windows will be a nightmare.

gfodor 15y ago
This is a striking point. Up until now, switching costs off of the iPhone were basically a matter of dealing with AT&T. Once the iCloud tentacles are in deep enough it will be nearly impossible to say goodbye to all the licensed content that I only can access through Apple devices.
- pyre 15y ago
  Though it depends on Apple's licensing terms, Apps that work on multiple platforms have an incentive to allow you to export the data that it syncs with iCloud. They want to keep you as a customer if you jump ship to Android.
- guptaneil 15y ago
  How does iCloud make it harder to move away from iOS? All of my apps are already locked into iOS, regardless of iCloud. This is true of any OS though.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - mcherm 15y ago
    I'm not tethered to my apps... I can, if necessary, move to new apps. Once I did everything in Emacs, but I have moved on. I AM, however, tethered to my data.
napierzaza 15y ago
This is a very narrow understanding about what businesses do. They don't think of things that lock in users. They think of features that people will want to use. Solutions to peoples problems, even ones they didn't know they had. So if you're good enough at that, people have trouble giving up your platform or service. Calling it lock in is just good features and service in a negative light. "Oh, Apple does great to replace things when they break, but it's just lock in. It's not actually good service."
- ChrisLTD 15y ago
  Sure, thinking of good features is the first step. But then isn't the next step figuring out how to make money?
  - napierzaza 15y ago
    If you have all the features you make the money on the hardware with the features. But describing things as only "lock in" is pretty meaningless as a comment. It implies that all it's doing is increasing switching costs and not actually offering anything to the user. But it would only increase switching costs in the event that it WAS an attractive feature. Features that are not useful or interesting to users aren't going to affect switching costs, or lock in.
    - adambyrtek 15y ago
      Counterexample: Company X using a proprietary file format for their office suite. This is neither useful nor interesting to users, but definitely creates a lock-in.
- c0riander 15y ago
  Creating switching costs is in fact a regular market strategy and is certainly more than just doing something so well that people will have trouble giving it up. Facebook has switching costs because all your friends are on it, not on another network, plus you'd have to learn a whole new set of privacy settings, right? The Kindle has switching costs because all your books are in your Kindle library and you can't transfer them to the Nook. Moving has switching costs because you have to give people a new address, learn a new neighborhood, memorize new driving routes, etc. Strong businesses often have very natural switching costs built in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_costs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_costs
tedunangst 15y ago
Are your reading list, email, calendar, to do list, and office documents not tied to the google cloud? If you use enough of them, isn't switching to yahoo/msn/apple going to be a nightmare? There doesn't appear to be much difference to me. Also, minor point, your music is not tied to a subscription. The syncing is. Cancel the subscription, keep the files.
- joev 15y ago
  The Data Liberation project is at least a token attempt to ward off accusations of Google lock-in: http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/
- mhansen 15y ago
  All those things you mention are exportable, and yahoo/msn/apple could write an importer against these APIs to make it easy.
thought_alarm 15y ago
> A lot of Apple's big announcements today were > about features that create lock-in. Nonsense. It's only lock-in in that the user is locked into a feature that's really great and useful. In other words, no lock-in at all. Their music and their content hasn't gone anywhere. Their contacts and calendar events are easily shared and exported via standard formats. They only thing they lose by leaving is the great software.
- reemrevnivek 15y ago
  Agreed, the key here is that everything is easily shared and exported via standard formats. If that's the case, there is no lock-in. The fact that Windows/Android/Linux doesn't have a feature or tool that you can import the data to also doesn't mean you have lock-in. It just means the market is a little inelastic, that's all.
- lurker14 15y ago
  10 years after release, iPhoto still cannot export a complete set of user-created photo metadata. 10 years and counting.
  - sambeau 15y ago
    It does title, keywords and location. What else does a casual photographer need?
- sesqu 15y ago
  It's only lock-in in that the user is locked in [--] In other words, no lock-in at all. I really don't understand what you're trying to say here. Vendor lock-in doesn't only apply when you don't like the product. Now, if there were no other products you could switch to, that would invalidate lock-in, but it's reasonable to assume that the product being initially good is essential for lock-in to work at all.
  - swombat 15y ago
    No one is forcing you to use Apple's messaging platform. You can pay for SMS instead, if you feel that's the "free" option. No one is forcing you to upload your music to the iCloud. You can keep syncing it the same way you always have (afaict, anyway). No one is forcing you to buy an iPhone, iPad, or any other Apple product. What kind of lock-in are you on about? No one is even forcing you to upgrade to Lion. Keep running Snow Leopard if you want. If you don't like it, don't buy it. There are plenty of other vendors. The only way in which you could claim that Apple was "locking people in" is that they offer an integrated experience, so that if you go all-Apple, things work better. Well, damn them, they should be shot! How dare they try to offer an integrated user experience to their paying customers? What bastards!
rimantas 15y ago
> Your music is tied to a $25 iTunes subscriptions But it is not. > they even want your text messaging tied to your iOS > devices Another way to look at it: your text messaging is freed from your carrier. > Then there's all those apps you bought on the Mac and iOS App > Stores that you'll never be able to transfer to another system. How is that different from any other system?
- saurik 15y ago
  Seriously? Before the unified App Store concept, cross-device upgrade pricing was very common. You get Word for Mac one year, and then you pay a fraction of the price to upgrade to word for Windows the next; you get a medical dictionary for your Palm Treo one year, and then pay a fraction of the price to upgrade to the same app for your new BlackBerry the next... Apple wants to control the business of software sale, and in so doing control what those practices mean for their platform: developers are then kept from seeing their customer lists, forcing everyone to get a new kind of "lock in" to the platform that has never before been common.
  - niels_olson 15y ago
    Your examples seem to be pretty small corner cases. I'll add one though: when I got the Adobe Lightroom beta, I got executables for Windows and Mac. And with my upgrades, I still get both executables. But the elephant in the room at the time was that the vast majority of software was being sold into Windows boxes and the only upgrade path was up. the lateral transfer schemes were many and varied, but all trivial compared to the big pipe called Windows XP.
    - saurik 15y ago
      On mobile, these "corner cases" are the majority of sales: every year there is some "new king of the hill", from random Nokia or Motorola devices, through Palm, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry. And, even on desktop with our example: Windows itself was the lock-in, not the sale; if a competitor to Windows did show up, the apps would rapidly move (and were in fact already selling both executables): if the sales were caught up in a monolithic App Store, users would balk at developer's inabilities to give them upgrade discounts, and are much more likely to stick to their platform.

gfodor 15y ago

This is a striking point. Up until now, switching costs off of the iPhone were basically a matter of dealing with AT&T. Once the iCloud tentacles are in deep enough it will be nearly impossible to say goodbye to all the licensed content that I only can access through Apple devices.

pyre 15y ago
Though it depends on Apple's licensing terms, Apps that work on multiple platforms have an incentive to allow you to export the data that it syncs with iCloud. They want to keep you as a customer if you jump ship to Android.
guptaneil 15y ago
How does iCloud make it harder to move away from iOS? All of my apps are already locked into iOS, regardless of iCloud. This is true of any OS though.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- mcherm 15y ago
  I'm not tethered to my apps... I can, if necessary, move to new apps. Once I did everything in Emacs, but I have moved on. I AM, however, tethered to my data.

napierzaza 15y ago

This is a very narrow understanding about what businesses do. They don't think of things that lock in users. They think of features that people will want to use. Solutions to peoples problems, even ones they didn't know they had. So if you're good enough at that, people have trouble giving up your platform or service. Calling it lock in is just good features and service in a negative light. "Oh, Apple does great to replace things when they break, but it's just lock in. It's not actually good service."

ChrisLTD 15y ago
Sure, thinking of good features is the first step. But then isn't the next step figuring out how to make money?
- napierzaza 15y ago
  If you have all the features you make the money on the hardware with the features. But describing things as only "lock in" is pretty meaningless as a comment. It implies that all it's doing is increasing switching costs and not actually offering anything to the user. But it would only increase switching costs in the event that it WAS an attractive feature. Features that are not useful or interesting to users aren't going to affect switching costs, or lock in.
  - adambyrtek 15y ago
    Counterexample: Company X using a proprietary file format for their office suite. This is neither useful nor interesting to users, but definitely creates a lock-in.
c0riander 15y ago
Creating switching costs is in fact a regular market strategy and is certainly more than just doing something so well that people will have trouble giving it up. Facebook has switching costs because all your friends are on it, not on another network, plus you'd have to learn a whole new set of privacy settings, right? The Kindle has switching costs because all your books are in your Kindle library and you can't transfer them to the Nook. Moving has switching costs because you have to give people a new address, learn a new neighborhood, memorize new driving routes, etc. Strong businesses often have very natural switching costs built in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_costs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_costs

tedunangst 15y ago

Are your reading list, email, calendar, to do list, and office documents not tied to the google cloud? If you use enough of them, isn't switching to yahoo/msn/apple going to be a nightmare? There doesn't appear to be much difference to me. Also, minor point, your music is not tied to a subscription. The syncing is. Cancel the subscription, keep the files.

joev 15y ago
The Data Liberation project is at least a token attempt to ward off accusations of Google lock-in: http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/
mhansen 15y ago
All those things you mention are exportable, and yahoo/msn/apple could write an importer against these APIs to make it easy.

thought_alarm 15y ago

> A lot of Apple's big announcements today were > about features that create lock-in. Nonsense. It's only lock-in in that the user is locked into a feature that's really great and useful. In other words, no lock-in at all. Their music and their content hasn't gone anywhere. Their contacts and calendar events are easily shared and exported via standard formats. They only thing they lose by leaving is the great software.

reemrevnivek 15y ago
Agreed, the key here is that everything is easily shared and exported via standard formats. If that's the case, there is no lock-in. The fact that Windows/Android/Linux doesn't have a feature or tool that you can import the data to also doesn't mean you have lock-in. It just means the market is a little inelastic, that's all.
lurker14 15y ago
10 years after release, iPhoto still cannot export a complete set of user-created photo metadata. 10 years and counting.
- sambeau 15y ago
  It does title, keywords and location. What else does a casual photographer need?
sesqu 15y ago
It's only lock-in in that the user is locked in [--] In other words, no lock-in at all. I really don't understand what you're trying to say here. Vendor lock-in doesn't only apply when you don't like the product. Now, if there were no other products you could switch to, that would invalidate lock-in, but it's reasonable to assume that the product being initially good is essential for lock-in to work at all.
- swombat 15y ago
  No one is forcing you to use Apple's messaging platform. You can pay for SMS instead, if you feel that's the "free" option. No one is forcing you to upload your music to the iCloud. You can keep syncing it the same way you always have (afaict, anyway). No one is forcing you to buy an iPhone, iPad, or any other Apple product. What kind of lock-in are you on about? No one is even forcing you to upgrade to Lion. Keep running Snow Leopard if you want. If you don't like it, don't buy it. There are plenty of other vendors. The only way in which you could claim that Apple was "locking people in" is that they offer an integrated experience, so that if you go all-Apple, things work better. Well, damn them, they should be shot! How dare they try to offer an integrated user experience to their paying customers? What bastards!

rimantas 15y ago

> Your music is tied to a $25 iTunes subscriptions But it is not. > they even want your text messaging tied to your iOS > devices Another way to look at it: your text messaging is freed from your carrier. > Then there's all those apps you bought on the Mac and iOS App > Stores that you'll never be able to transfer to another system. How is that different from any other system?

saurik 15y ago
Seriously? Before the unified App Store concept, cross-device upgrade pricing was very common. You get Word for Mac one year, and then you pay a fraction of the price to upgrade to word for Windows the next; you get a medical dictionary for your Palm Treo one year, and then pay a fraction of the price to upgrade to the same app for your new BlackBerry the next... Apple wants to control the business of software sale, and in so doing control what those practices mean for their platform: developers are then kept from seeing their customer lists, forcing everyone to get a new kind of "lock in" to the platform that has never before been common.
- niels_olson 15y ago
  Your examples seem to be pretty small corner cases. I'll add one though: when I got the Adobe Lightroom beta, I got executables for Windows and Mac. And with my upgrades, I still get both executables. But the elephant in the room at the time was that the vast majority of software was being sold into Windows boxes and the only upgrade path was up. the lateral transfer schemes were many and varied, but all trivial compared to the big pipe called Windows XP.
  - saurik 15y ago
    On mobile, these "corner cases" are the majority of sales: every year there is some "new king of the hill", from random Nokia or Motorola devices, through Palm, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry. And, even on desktop with our example: Windows itself was the lock-in, not the sale; if a competitor to Windows did show up, the apps would rapidly move (and were in fact already selling both executables): if the sales were caught up in a monolithic App Store, users would balk at developer's inabilities to give them upgrade discounts, and are much more likely to stick to their platform.