Let Me Go Back (2000)

This has nothing to do with ethics. The post is not suggesting we avoid lock-in out of kindness, only because it may remove a barrier to entry and therefore lead to more sales. To put it another way: the risk of losing customers because you make it easy for them to leave may be smaller than the risk of not getting those customers at all because they perceive and fear the lock-in up front.

Having said that, I suspect the world has moved on since then. Two decades of whizz-bang freemium SaaS products have created a culture where people just want to sign up and start doing stuff and so - certainly when it comes to shadow IT type products - fear of lock-in just isn't a thing. Also there are many more connections and integrations between apps. People find ways to move their Confluence into Notion, or just chuck it away and start again. All those Canva designs, Miro moodboards, whatever flash-tool-of-the-week sprint retrospectives that people are creating, probably have between zero and little value six months down the line, or where really necessary can be downloaded or screengrabbed in some read-only kind of way, so outside of Enterprise Sales I suspect nobody really cares.

But you can't do that when you're the market underdog; e.g. when Lotus 1-2-3 has most of the market share, you can't take that away with a vendor-locking product.

It's what you do when you're dominant; to protect against the up-and-comers from taking away the users.

So, one thing we can learn from this article is that the reasoning can be applied by the dominant player to understand what barriers keep users from switching, and protect those barriers.

E.g. the dominant spreadsheet player understands that when the up-and-comer spreadsheet can write the dominant document format, users will have a reason to switch since they can go back. So, vendor-lock countermeasures: distinguish documents written by up-and-comer and break their loading.

> His points are valid, but they'd make more impact if the underdog was not Microsoft.

Words fail me here. This is one story, and one strategy, of how Microsoft became a monopolist. Everything described here works and it works because Microsoft was the 800-pound gorilla, not in spite of that! Monopolies aren't born fully formed.