If we take our cues from article headlines, vendor lock-in apparently is very bad and
should definitely be avoided, especially when moving to the cloud. A simple Google
search will return many articles with this message. After all, everyone knows vendor
lock-in is bad, right?
Let’s begin by making sure we are all using the same definition. Wikipedia describes
vendor lock-in as:
“In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer
lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services,
unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.”
The term brings to mind manipulative tactics by vendors to extract punitive sums from
customers. Is this warranted? History tells us there is some basis for concern. In the
world of technology, vendor lock-in has indeed happened repeatedly, reaching all the
way back to IBM mainframe customers more than 50 years ago. Typically providing a
complete single-source package of hardware, operating system, software and services,
those relationships represented the ultimate in vendor lock-in. To get the benefit of the
complete package, an enterprise had to go all-in with the vendor, making it extremely
expensive and difficult to migrate away.
Over the years, this pattern has been repeated in various contexts, as we have been
locked into operating systems such as Windows or Mac, or database technologies such
as Oracle. These experiences have given vendor lock-in an understandably negative
connotation.
WINTER 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 75