6 Managing Lock-In

The great fortunes of the information age lie in the hands of companies that have successfully established proprietary architectures that are used by a large installed base of locked-in customers. And many of the biggest headaches of the information age are visited upon companies that are locked into information systems that are inferior, orphaned, or monopolistically supplied.

In the last chapter we saw how to identify, quantify, and classify the basic sources of switching costs and lock-in. Armed with an improved understanding of switching costs, we are now poised to explore strategies for managing lock-in.

The first portion of this chapter is directed at buyers of information technology, which includes virtually everyone ...

Get Information Rules now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.