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Comment by ChrisLTD | Hacker News Reader

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.

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  > 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?

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.

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.

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.

I was just aiming for the cornerstone of your argument

> cross-device upgrade pricing was very common

Perhaps from within the industry having a lateral path was a common denominator, something every company had, and in that definition, it may have been "common", but not from a consumer perspective. The opportunity to buy PC software for a Mac was quite unusual for a consumer. There are still plenty of full time Windows folks thinking about getting Macs and asking their friends "Will I be able to use <app> on it?". Maybe not in SF, but most of the people I work with (and we're talking doctors, military planners, etc) are still in a Windows world, at work and at home.

My argument mentioned Windows and Mac only because most people are more comfortable with that example. As end-to-end App Stores have only become popular recently on mobile, I only consider this conversation to currently apply there. However, the premise of the Mac App Store also /assumes/ a non-Windows-dominated world /by definition/, so I fail to see why you feel your comment attacks my argument... :(.

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.

The Data Liberation project is at least a token attempt to ward off accusations of Google lock-in:

http://www.dataliberation.org/

All those things you mention are exportable, and yahoo/msn/apple could write an importer against these APIs to make it easy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

    > 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.

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.

10 years after release, iPhoto still cannot export a complete set of user-created photo metadata. 10 years and counting.

It does title, keywords and location. What else does a casual photographer need?

  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.

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!

  If you don't like it, don't buy it.

That's not what vendor lock-in is about. Lock-in means that after you bought it, you can't reasonably switch to something better, something that commonly you didn't know about or that didn't exist when you made the initial buy. For example, when offering integrated services, lock-in might mean that they won't allow a third party to integrate with their suite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in

Well, I just bought car X, but then car Y came out and I like it better, but they won't allow me to switch without buying a whole new car!

I guess car makers practice vendor lock-in too by your definition.

In fact, almost anyone who sells something practices some form of lock-in.

No. For the car example, lock-in means you aren't able to use off-brand accessories, or service your car in an unlicensed shop. However, cars are mostly self-contained, so this mostly only comes up with aftermarket stereo systems and membership programs.

And yes, mild lock-in is very common. That doesn't make it a good practice from the consumer's point of view.

Considering how hard it is to get people to agree on interoperability standards even if they want to agree, I think lock-in is simply inevitable.

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."

Sure, thinking of good features is the first step. But then isn't the next step figuring out how to make money?

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.

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.

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

There will always be a switching cost, even just remembering a new URL.

Surely companies do things to make the switching cost higher. Like as you said, locking ebooks to a particular device.

But creating a service or feature that is only on your platform just means you're doing something no one else is doing; making you more attractive to consumers (and creating a higher switching cost).

I think one of the biggest reasons your being down-voted is because your confusing the act of creating solutions to problems with what lock-in actually is.

Arguments can be made that because it costs more to switch from one platform to another, that is lock-in. IMO though, lock-in specifically refers to acts where a company intentionally tries to prevent people from moving away from their product or platform, most often manifesting as closed data formats or an inability to extract data that you yourself deposited in a system.

All the features Apple announced today are features that people have been demanding from Apple and any other vendor. What's the lock in?

Putting DRM on music so you can only play it on iPod is lock in.

Though I agree Apple is integrating services into iOS that are only available to iOS.So I imagine that gives them lock in.

I don't want to start trying to guess as Apple's motivations, but I don't see them coming out with demanded features as intentional lock in as it appears to be their solution to the problem.

>> What's the lock in?

I never said there was lock-in with this new update, I was pointing out what I perceived to be one of the biggest reasons your comment was down-voted.

From the brief bits and pieces I've read about this, I've heard of nothing so far that smells like lock-in. And I'm by no stretch an Apple fanboy either.

I was responding to your comment while restating my point. Not arguing with your comment. :-)

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