Talk:Vendor lock-in/Archive 1

Comparison with lock-ins
Removed the first paragrah: In the British Isles, the term lock-in refers to an illegal gathering in a pub after the hours during which alcohol may be legally sold, where the landlord locks his guests in, dims lights and draws curtains to avoid the attention of the police.

That doesn't make sense in this article -- it refers to illicit after-hours drinking, while the article refers to the use of network-effect to prevent competition. Ojw 12:14, 16 October 2005 (UTC)


 * um, sounds like it needs a disambiguation page, not deletion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.160.128.228 (talk • contribs) 19:50, 5 May 2006

You save Java has failed on the desktop? This is just not true, I spent the last 3 years writing a Java desktop program. Java is a powerful and viable desktop solution. Java is not a good example of Vendor lock in. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.156.248.138 (talk • contribs) 08:03, 14 January 2006

Lock-in versus "Razor/Razor Blade"
There seems to be confusion in the article regarding a lock-in versus the Razor blade business approaches.

As the introduction states, lock-in is where you create a cost barrier to leave a system. This is different than what happens with razor blades and printers. In both of those examples, the non-consumable is often very inexpensive and the company profits from the sale of consumable parts. To ensure the original company receives the profits from consumable sales, they use a proprietary approach to exclude others.

However, this is often not lock-in because the cost to change, especially in the razor and printer examples, is limited to the new inexpensive non-consumable (and any unused, proprietary consumables left at the time of change).

In the main article, I would like to add a section which mentioned the differences between Lock-in and Razor and blades with a link to that other article, and remove the printer example. What does everyone think? 216.148.248.31 20:10, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * That's an excellent idea. The Ikea mattress size issue is a nice counter example, so is just about any discussion of consumer electronics and batteries.  RossPatterson 23:25, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks, although I don't follow with the Ikea mattress. In editing the article, and the addition of the connector conspiracy section, I've tried to show how sometimes its lock-in, and sometimes its razor blade.

intro para getting a little long ;; break out into 'examples' section?
who wants to have a go at this. drefty.mac 01:20, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I'll take a stab at it Davandron | Talk 01:40, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I re-organized the article, adding subsections and relocating much of the material from the top into the article itself. Hopefully, the header to the article is now a "quick answer" with the details and examples below (in the article itself). Davandron | Talk 02:25, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

List of non-open formats?
Would there be a need to create an article listing all non-open format which target a Pottersville pattern? Like listing at one place the Windows API, the AIM protocol, Apple's Fairplay, Skype etc.? Peter S. 16:49, 10 November 2005 (UTC), 21:06, 23 July 2006 (UTC)


 * If you can define all the ways in which something could be non-open. And that could be quite a lot, and it would be a permute, not a hierarchy; ie, foo is documented but patent-encumbered, while bar is undocumented but not patent encumbered, while baz is documented but chipset-specific. An API and a format are radically different things, and a format and a network protocol while not wholly dissimilar are certainly no-where near the same thing. I suppose you could list every file format and API ever and then figure out a taxonomy for the ways in which they are open and not open. All in all, this is a monumental task to perform in an NPOV fashion. -- Akb4 05:39, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Category for non-interoperable systems / Vendor-lock in?
Do you think it would help to have a category identifying Category:Non-interoperable systems? The issue is being voted on, please contribute your vote / opinion: here. Pgr94 23:36, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Ikea Mattress Sizes
Ikea making mattresses a funny size to force you to buy linen from them is a myth. In fact Ikea make mattresses to European sizes- I live in the UK and have an Ikea bed, and can buy linen anywhere I please. They are just non standard if you are in America.

Also, I read that :http://www.mbajungle.com/magazine.cfm?INC=inc_article.cfm&artid=2110&template=1 Ikea have changed in the US to US bed sizes. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.148.180.5 (talk • contribs) 18:06, 21 October 2006


 * I am in the UK, and own several beds from Ikea, with Ikea mattresses, and can confirm that the mattresses I own do not match fitted bed linen from the vast majority of other suppliers, including, but not limited to, Marks & Spencer and Argos. The standard length for an Ikea single or double bed is 200cm ( 78" ), while the standard length for a UK single or double bed is 75". Only when you reach king-size are lengths compatible, but then widths become incompatible - a UK standard king-size bed is 60" ( 152cm ) wide, but Ikea king-size mattresses are either 140cm or 160cm wide. You can check for yourself by comparing the figures quoted on the Ikea corporate website with the list of standard mattress sizes located here: http://www.csgnetwork.com/bedsizes.html
 * With this in mind, I'm restoring my earlier comments about vendor lock-in. WMMartin 17:45, 3 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Again, I doubt that this is lock in, they just produce the same bed for all markets - they don't even change names across the regions. It might be that having to by bed linen from them is a side-effect they like, but if it was their primary concern, they would start selling US- or UK-sized mattresses in Europe. But since they sell the standard European size there (their largest market), the only reason that they don't sell local sizes elsewhere is that they want to produce one product only... I think this should be removed, it is an unfair assumption that doesn't withstand a closer look Quark999 15:45, 1 November 2007 (UTC)


 * If you check Ikea's website for Canada/US, the mattress sizes are the King/Queen/Full/Twin that are usual in North America, so it does sound like the UK is simply too small a market for Ikea to specialize their products for. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.58.12.46 (talk) 23:07, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Other examples
Is the Nespresso patented coffee-capsule technology suitable as example of vendor lock-in?

Only one brand of coffee (Nestlé) is allowed in the machines using this technology (see Nespresso for details).

Maroual (talk) 12:27, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Firefox + QuickTime example
"Therefore, buying an iPod means that your Firefox choices are taken away, even though the use case of Firefox is completely unrelated to the use case of an iPod."

As far as I know, users can still change the player used for MP3 files in Firefox's preferences? i.e., they're not locked-in, they can easily switch to another media player?

If that was lock-in, then surely every application which changes your computer to make certain file types "Always Open With" that application would also be an example of lock-in?! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dasequeltocow (talk • contribs) 18:46, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Lock-in simulation link
This edit removed an external link (Lock-in Simulation) from the article; the edit summary said it was spam. I don't see how it is a spam link. Could the editor please explain? Thanks. --Joshua Issac (talk) 15:48, 26 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, it was one of only four edits by, all of which were links to homepage.univie.ac.at/manfred.fuellsack. I called it a spammer's link rather than a spam link, since it was from this guy who showed himself to be a spammer; no judgement on the link  itself; if you think it's a good one, you can put it back. Dicklyon (talk) 16:06, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

No worries if you think the linked simulations were no good and not worthy being linked to wikipedia. But could you please explain in what way "this guy" (i.e. me) "showed himself to be a spammer". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.109.112.187 (talk) 18:35, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for forgetting to sign.--80.109.112.187 (talk) 07:53, 31 March 2009 (UTC)


 * It's probably because they were your only edits, and all links were pointing to pages of the same website. --Joshua Issac (talk) 19:32, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

"Active Server Pages tied to Internet Explorer"
I removed this line because this is not at all true, and never has been. Perhaps the original author was thinking of ActiveX. 65.161.188.11 (talk) 23:53, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Java
From the current version of the article:


 * Sun Microsystems' unwillingness to open Java to external standardization bodies and the lack of multiple competing Java runtime implementations is widely held to be the reason Java has failed on the desktop.

I dispute the facts of this statement. First, I'm not convinced Java has failed on the desktop. As I write this, the most popular download from SourceForge is a desktop program written in Java (Azureus). And it's been in that position for several months, I believe. Secondly, I'd suggest the primary reason for Java's difficulty penetrating the desktop market is that it is quite difficult to use it to produce a professional-looking GUI. Java applications typically look "wrong", and feel sluggish. Thirdly, there are multiple competing JRE implementations. It's just that Sun's typically leads the others in terms of new features by a significant margin. Also, who holds this opinion? I've only heard it from a minority of politically-motivated free software advocates.

Should the sentence be deleted, or rephrased to take into account these objections? —Preceding unsigned comment added by JulesH (talk • contribs) 16:07, 9 July 2005

This sentence must be deleted. Java is not an example of Vendor lock in. Java is the exact opposite of Vendor lock in (remember multi platform?). The purpose of Java is to prevent Vendor lockin. Also Java is alive and well on the desktop, it has a very rich and powerful GUI, and outperforms other desktop programming languages I could mention. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.156.248.138 (talk • contribs) 08:07, 14 January 2006

I wouldn't say the opposite of lock-in, since the cross platform is a myth(Java is only cross-platform on platforms Sun programs for and on the platforms they do program for it is fairly inconsistent compared say to using GTK) that actually discourages cross platform coding practices. However, having code in java 1.5, Sun require you to upgrade to 1.6 simply by release another version with people being unwilling to have multiple jre's installed, so yes locked in. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.206.82.56 (talk) 18:13, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Sony Vendor Lock In
I do not believe that all the examples cited in the Sony section of the examples are related to vendor lock in. While there is no doubt that the Memory Stick was such a move, I don't believe most of the media formats are. Sony wanted the Betamax video format to have be the de fact video format. The only way they would have achieved this is by licensing the format to other video recorder manufacturers - and I believe Sony actually wanted to do this. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the VHS format became the dominant format in spite of being introduced later and having no notable advantages at the time. If Sony really intended Betamax as a vendor lock in then even they would have seen that it was a road to nowhere.

The other examples of their products were similarly competing with other formats and Sony would have wished their version to dominate over the competition. The Minidisc competed with the Philips DCC (and actually displaced it). Several vendors adopted the format at the time - hardly an example of vendor lock-in. Video8 and Hi8 aimed to displace VHS-C and SVHS-C respectively and although they failed, they sold in more or less equal numbers to the competition by a variety of manufacturers. Elcaset, MicroMV and Universal Media Disc were attempts at creating a market but were simply products that were never going anywhere, though Elcaset may have stood a better chance if it had been properly marketed. 20.133.0.13 (talk) 12:24, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

SD adapters
(copied from insertion into article) C RETOG 8(t/c) 19:01, 2 November 2009 (UTC) + Actually, one can find cheap (7$) adapters that can use a TF(microSD) card and simulate a ms pro duo card. The big advantage here is that a solution for an 8g ms pro duo would be about 30$ (with a noname 8 g tf card) AND that a sony camera owner can use the tf in the adapter to take pictures, then move the tf into an SD adapter to transfer the data. (More info needed about the legal issues of a tf to ms-pro-duo adapter.)

EPSON
I propose to mention the case of Epson ink cartridges into the article. 84.79.151.4 (talk) 09:31, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Cameras section - proprietary memory cards
Given Sony's current range of DSLR and their future (to be released beginning late February 2010) compact (CyberShot) and video (HandyCam) products, this is a notice that I (or other) will update this section to reflect the change in fact. At this point in time I am considering writing a section on storage device based vendor lock in from a historical perspective given that I consider it both significant to present and future readers in that relevant products will still be in existence and will of particular interest in the event that a manufacturer attempts to reintroduce a similar system. Disclaimer: I work in camera sales (non manufacturer specific). Psydexzerity (talk) 09:26, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Emacs Paragraph
I just removed a paragraph on lock-in in Free libre open source software with this edit. The paragraph was essentially a summary of this blog post which included as a citation. I could not find any incoming to the blog post with a Google search and very little links to the blog in general. In other words, the blog post does not seem to be a notable discussion of vendor lock-in and does not qualify as a reliable source.

More problematically, the example does not seem to even satisfy the definition of vendor lock-in described in the introduction of this article in that there is no vendor and no exclusive control. Indeed, the author the blog post is an alternate vendor of modified version of Emacs (the software he claims is locked-in into)! It's an interesting idea for a blog post, but it seems to be one author's opinion and only distracts from an otherwise decent encyclopedic explanation of the concept.

If someone would to find evidence to support the idea that the position is notable and the source reliable, it might be more appropriate in an article on switching costs or sunk costs.

I don't follow this page. If folks respond, please leave me a message on my talk page. Thanks! — m a k o ๛  17:44, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

"Connector Conspiracy"
From what I understand, connector conspiracy is forcing someone to replace all of their accessories when they upgrade the core system by changing all the connectors to those accessories for the new model. This doesn't seem to be lock-in; in fact, it has the opposite effect in that people won't want to upgrade because they can't reuse the components.

Although having typed that I can see how it can be lock-in; if you create a device with all proprietary connectors (so that everyone else's connectors can't match yours), then if someone wants to switch to a competitor they will have to buy all new accessories (hence, a higher cost to switch).

I'm going to add a new section and detail this, if thats ok Davandron | Talk 02:33, 1 November 2006 (UTC)


 * connector conspiracy used to be a separate article, but got deleted. It should be explained that the phrase is a hacker joke that implies collusion among manufacturers to use incompatible connectors on hardware cables and boards, as if at some secret cabal meeting Sun would say "we'll use the db-50" and IBM would say "OK, modified CN-50 for us!".


 * This is certainly not limited to upgrades within a manufacturer's offerings, nor to intentional vendor lock-in; it also includes unintentional vendor lock-in. Additionally, in most cases, you weren't actually locked in, you simply needed to buy or make an adapter. There were probably at least a half-dozen incompatible connectors for scsi-1 because the standards process wasn't coherent; everyone implemented their own way, and some used certain connectors because they were cheaper, or smaller, or resembled something they were already using somewhere else. In computer circles, I've most often heard it referred to with regard to actual cable and board connectors; printer ink is intentional vendor lock-in in a razor-and-blade model fashion, and not really quite the same thing. I'll mod the article a bit to include above. -- Akb4 03:43, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

re: "scenario of a cabal of manufacturers colluding in secret to sell incompatible connectors."

So, the end of that cabal is to give us unusual ends for our cables? 24.68.250.110 (talk) 20:58, 6 March 2011 (UTC)]

NPOV?
I know you guys are supporters of open source, but I feel the language in the article is a little too strong to constitute a neutral point of view. Yes, bash me, flame me and feed me to the trolls golden brown and delicious, but I seriously think parts of the article need to be reworded to allow the reader to decide for themselves whether lock-in is a benefit or a curse. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.56.196.133 (talk) 20:40, 24 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Give re-wording a shot, and if your re-wording is a problem, it is likely to get reverted, but it might be an improvement. Or suggest specific things here which you think need changing. I think there's likely to be difficulty with the idea that lock-in could be a blessing, though. If it's a blessing, then it doesn't need locking-in, because folks will stick with the blessing. Lock-in implies people stick even when they would (under some circumstances) be better off switching. C RETOG 8(t/c) 20:53, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

What about Apple?
It is a truly vendor lock-in:

Apple Hardware and Apple Software (Mac OS X) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ajoe (talk • contribs) 2005-02-13 03:32:46


 * Yes possibly, but lock in usually only matters much if the vendor has market power or the ability to influence the whole market. Apple has well less than 5% market share (often estimated now at about 3% actually), so they really can't exert much market power. - Taxman 17:34, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)


 * Matters to whom? If you are Apple, or someone who has a $30k piece of equipment that will only work with a mac, it matters to you a great deal. An economist's view of the entire computer industry is a pretty high-level perspective to take, and one that may be entirely irrelevant to companies and customers "on the ground". akb4 5 May 2006


 * The apple lock-in case is more egregious in the area of digital music, where Apple is estimated to handle over 80% of the market for online music sales and over 90% of the market of music players. I have added information on an ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Apple, I hope that it should prove enough to keep the section. --DDG 22:18, 3 March 2006 (UTC)


 * The description of Apple's music as playing only on Apple's players is disingenuous. One doesn't buy music using the iPod, and one can play it on at least any machine capable of running iTunes -- most of which machines are not sold by Apple.  My own setup outputs from my computer to my amplifier so I can use my computer as an enormous jukebox.  Most of my music is encoded from CDs I bought, so Apple isn't even getting the benefit of steering me to its site.  The few songs I did buy from Apple happily play on amplifier through my computer. -- unsigned.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.117.217.242 (talk) 14:42, 30 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I think the digital music paragraph is well worth keeping. What I can’t see the value of is the hardware and software which User:P0lyglut keeps adding.  I don’t understand how Apple hardware and software (except for the iPod) is any different from every other computer company which makes hardware and/or software.  e.g. Why not list the GIMP?  They deliberately keep the .xcf format hidden (for their own valid reasons), therefore locking you in.  Barefootguru 02:43, 4 March 2006 (UTC)


 * You mean this format: XCF (file format) "Thus the source code of the Gimp itself (which is freely available) is the reference documentation of the format." --unsigned


 * The article is missing an important distinguisher; we don't talk about intentional vs. non-intentional lock-in, nor about the feature differences. For example, you could say Apple's use of the 3.5" floppy was lock-in, but they used it not because they wanted lock-in, but because it was higher capacity, faster, and smaller. And they didn't even invent the sucker, they just bought it from Sony.


 * MacDraw and MacWrite are a different matter entirely from iLife. When they were released there were dozens of similar programs none of which could interoperate, and a plethora of types of disk drive and filesystem formats as well. MacWrite files are no more locked in than Bank Street Writer or PFS or XYwrite; certainly someone who used a word processor that was only available on an Amiga or Atari ST was just as locked in, and folks who used dedicated machines like CPT, Exxon Qyx, or Wang word processors were even more locked in. This section is totally without historical perspective in that Apple's designs and behavior were no different from anyone else's at the time (at least until one gets to the "look and feel" lawsuits, and those are only slightly lock-in related). In many lock-in cases, it actually costs the manufacturer money in r&d, custom tooling and skills to create lock-in, but in the computer industry of the 1980s, it was the other way around: interoperability cost extra money, and in many cases couldn't really be achieved -- if there are no standards, you can't adhere to them.


 * Even now, GUI-based programs are locked to platform-specific GUI libraries. This is not because of intentional lock-in, it's more like differences in railway gauge; the nature of the beast is that if you write a program with the win32 gui API, you're basically locked into using on a Microsoft OS; it will be a kludge at best under any other system. Ditto for X11, Gnome, OS/2, Cocoa, Quickdraw, whatever.


 * In terms of iLife, I thought that was a suite, not a program? Doesn't it include iTunes, GarageBand, etc? iTunes can import music in several non-proprietary formats and except for DRM export it in readable ways as well. I think I'm gonna edit the computer section a lot; I don't know enough to know if the business professor's definition of lock-in includes intention, but it's hardly Original Research to note that it's unclear what avoiding lock-in would look like... I'm certainly locked in to my auto manufacturer for most parts, but it would be very difficult to have multiple car manufacturers making different models if this was not the case... -- Akb4 05:31, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * There are several examples, actually, that I remember from my Mac days in the early '90s. 1) Floppy disks, as mentioned; 2) ADB keyboards/mice (when everyone else started using PS/2 style; 3) Monitors are VGA but use a different connector (I made a converter for this once); 4) Modems use serial protocol, but don't use RS-232 DB-25 or DB-9 like the rest of the world; 5) Ethernet uses AAUI connector -- there is such a thing as AUI, which is a connector to more popular media, no doubt the same thing, but it has a different connector; 6) they used SCSI drives, thankfully mostly with standard connectors, but everything else that wasn't a server or a high-end workstation used IDE; 7) Localtalk, which was cheap but was a bow-wow and nobody else used it; 8) they always used serial printers and had funny cables, not parallel printers.  The use of proprietary components instead of widely-available, industry standard parts drove up the cost of the Macs back in the days when they were rapidly losing market share.


 * I might also add that IBM shot themselves in the foot with MCA architecture and not providing legacy ISA buses in their PS/2 series. When PCI came out, the early MBs always had a free ISA slot or two. That would have been the better way to go. Afalbrig 10:49, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Vendor Lock-In Remedy
Flamers! Rhetoric Propagandists! > The following is no spam! It's a Harvard University project!

Vendor Relationship Management

ProjectVRM is a new Berkman Center (Harvard University) research and development effort that is working to provide customers with tools that provide both independence from vendor lock-in and better ways of engaging with vendors -- on terms and by means that work better for both sides.

The primary theory behind ProjectVRM is that many market problems (including the widespread belief that customer lock-in is a "best practice") can only be solved from the customer side: by making the customer a fully-empowered actor in the marketplace, rather than one whose power in many cases is dependent on exclusive relationships with vendors, by coerced agreement provided entirely by those vendors. --89.247.155.112 (talk) 16:30, 14 September 2011 (UTC)


 * It's a university project, but it still looks like spam. If something from the project gets published (maybe in the Harvard Business Review?) and is directly applicable to vendor lock-in, that would certainly be something appropriate here. But as it is, the text looks like it's just promotional for ProjectVRM. C RETOG 8(t/c) 16:40, 14 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Nonsense, it's also a Remedy Category under Vendor Relationship Management well-accepted. I only raised some description text from the original resource. You fabricate bent hypotheses, feeble excuses and claims, because it's off the brim of your hat, thats all. It's a fully domestic Wikipedia resource. If it's not spam there, why should it be spam here? Just because the word spam is fixated on your lips? It looks more like Absurdistan on your part... --89.247.155.112 (talk) 17:46, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

SFP vendor lock-in
Seems it be type of hardware enforced compatibility issue. Cisco and HP are in it. See more at --89.113.248.22 (talk) 10:15, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

What about Apple's authentication chip?
This is a pretty obvious case, in which manufacturers have to pay several dollars per unit to include a custom Apple IC that does nothing but prove they paid the money, so that iPods will unlock their features. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Justanothervisitor (talk • contribs) 20:59, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
 * That would be an example of Product tying – an Apple product (really a feature enabler, but still) that you cannot unselect from a purchase from a different vendor. It is not vendor lock-in, because the cost of Apple's chip, as felt by the customer, is not a switching cost (it does not add to the cost of leaving Apple's empire in general).--84.209.119.158 (talk) 22:17, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Mac OS X EULA
I think that Apple's hardware lock in systems and their EULA only allowing Mac OS X to work on Apple's own hardware is very anti-competitive. In fact everyone talks about the Microsoft antitrust cases but Apple I would say are no better.

I am surprised that not much has been said about it on the main page and there is only a small amount about the Mac OS system on the talk page so far.

In the EU there are laws permitting reverse engineering for interoperability purposes and a german company have been making PCs shipped with OS X without any trouble from apple so far for two years now but I think that there should really be some sort of law put in place stopping companies from putting terms in the EULAs which provide vendor lock-in. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.27.52.108 (talk) 17:45, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Mid Importance Upgrade?
Subject fills in more minor details of economics, or adds a depth of understanding to the field. A practicing economist would find these subjects useful, but lay people would likely not. meaning that anyone who is a amateur, for example, would know this. isn't it approcriate to move to mid importance? -dillonoliviero 12:59 est 3/1/2014 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dillonoliviero (talk • contribs) 00:00, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Car Stereo Sizes
The article claims that car stereo systems being made in different sizes is an example of vendor lock in. This is not, in fact, the case. Car radio and stereo systems used to be manufactured in a standard size which almost any car would accept. The problem was that when a thief broke into the car and stole the radio/stereo, the potential market was any car owner. The car manufacturers were persuaded to make stealing the radio/stereo more of a problem, by making the radio/stereo size unique to the vehicle that it was fitted to. Thus, if the radio/stereo was stolen, the potential market was now very limited making the stolen item more difficult to hawk. DieSwartzPunkt (talk) 17:45, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree, I own a citroen C1, and am very happy that it doesn't have a standard radio/cd-player-bay. It is completely built in, cosmetically integrated with the card, and for the first time I'm not scared that my radio/CD-player will be stolen. That aspect is much more important than any "vendor lock in" argument. Mahjongg (talk) 18:47, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
 * The example you give IS a case of vendor lock-in, only not a negative one. It is intentional and with a laudable reason, but that doesn't make it an exception. It is one case of "positive" lock-in. Tharos (talk) 00:06, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

How is Google not yet mentioned in this article??
Google is practically the embodiment of this concept, especially with the Open Handset Alliance and YouTube. Aelius28 (talk) 04:45, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I just added other examples of google's lock-in. Feel free to add data on youtube or OHA to that section. Tharos (talk) 00:07, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Microsoft citation
The Microsoft citation purpotes to be from the year 1997 but references the year 2008. Something is weird there. --Petr Hudeček (talk) 05:33, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Camera lens mounts
Are incompatible lens mounts on cameras an example of vendor lock-in or not? This article once had a whole section on the topic, which was subsequently deleted, but it has recently made a small return. Horatio (talk) 01:43, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
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The title should be Customer lock-in
I think that the most of the text means customer lock-in nor vendor lock-in.

--JiE 13:31, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * That's a question of naming it after the subject or object, right? I suppose they really mean the same. —84.214.220.135 (talk) 18:15, 13 October 2016 (UTC)