tags: #publish links: [[Business Strategy and Competition]], [[Product Management]] created: 2021-07-26 Mon --- # Vendor Lock-in See also [[Network Effects]]; [[Create a platform instead of a product]]; [[Protecting your platform from competition]] **Lock-in** is when a product has features or properties that competitors do not - or cannot - replace, or which make migration difficult. This adds significant friction that makes it less likely that customers will switch to a competing product - even if that product is *better*. ## Classic examples - **Data formats**: Proprietary, preferably poorly documented data formats that can't easily be exported or converted. - **Extend the standard**: Encourage dependency on your vendor-specific features extending the relevant standard, so the competitor isn't fully compatible even if they both implement the standard. - **Patents**: Patent your critical features so competitors can't reproduce them. - **Hardware integration**: Couple the product to a specific environment that the competitor can't run reproduce. For example, sell the server and the software product together, and architect the software around custom hardware things, make the hardware only able to run your own products so switching involves a hardware replace. - **Cross-flow, adjacent products**: Couple the product to a suite of neatly integrated adjacent products that you also sell, and don't let your competitors integrate as closely. - **Grow a peripheral third-party ecosystem** around your product - this means it isn't enough for the competitor to clone your product, they'd also need to replicate much of the add-on functionality or get the third parties to do so. Competition is unequal because you didn't even have to write the addons yourself. Even Obsidian has managed to achieve this one! - More details: [[Create a platform instead of a product]] - See also [[It's a sterile walled garden]] :D - **Make it illegal for third parties to interoperate**, e.g. prevent them selling replacement parts via patents or by making your warranty void if third-party parts are used; make your API a licensed piece of intellectual property subject to contract and don't sell it to competitors. ## Lock-in and Public Cloud Platforms [[Vendor Lock-in and Public Cloud Platforms]] ## Employment lock-in A similar friction applies to moving jobs! See [[Costs of switching employers]]