Interconnect IT - Liverpool Web Designers and Developers

Technology Lock In

We’ve been doing a lot of work here lately at Interconnect IT, building products, defining our policies, building up our website… and it’s been fun, but very inward looking.

So now we want to look outside of ourselves, and see what it is about the world of technology that winds up customers. After all, if we can avoid that approach, perhaps we could gain? After all, part of being an ethical company is ‘playing nice’ with our customers.

It all started with a conversation about PVRs (Personal Video Recorders) that are so popular now. There’s Tivo, various Freeview (DVB) devices from Humax, Thomson and the big boys, and Sky+. We were chatting over a beer, discussing which ones are best, when one of our friends mentioned that he loved his Sky+ until the day he ended his Sky subscription. At that point, although his box belonged to him, and he could still get free-to-air channels, he had no access to his recorded shows!

In doing this Sky force a lock-in. It’s not a major one compared to the multi-million pound lock-ins that you see out there, but it’s significant because it means that in cancelling your subscription they penalise you just a touch. They may claim license terms or some such, but it’s still a lock-in.

This continues in many forms - sometimes unintentional, sometimes very much so. For example, you decide to develop your website using some proprietary technology like ColdFusion. Great product. But once you’re in and have a large website you’re relatively trapped. Any move to another web technology will be slow, painful and difficult. If Macromedia decided they no longer wanted to support the product because it was unpopular you’d be left with a website that could become obsolete pretty quickly. If you’re paying an annual license fee they could easily ramp up the cost, but because your cost of change is so great you decide to bear the cost and continue.

Of course, there’s no sign that Macromedia (or their new owners Adobe) will do this, so please, nobody sue us!

The Computer Associates Story

One company that was famous for this was Computer Associates. In the 90’s they were famous for high pressure tactics. A large part of this was in how they accounted for their performance in sales - the business model was based on getting big numbers in today, rather than looking forward. As a consequence it was favourable to a product manager to ramp up license fees in the short term and use lock-in to keep the customer stuck.

As time passed, CA started losing market share, and had little goodwill from customers who would, at the first chance, jump ship to a rival. Of course they weren’t alone in this - around about 2000/2001 a lot of the big technology vendors were struggling following years of aggressive business tactics. The world was angry at Microsoft for it’s aggressive policies towards PC vendors and people were also wondering if the whole Y2K hype was quite what the technology industry had made it out to be.

A change was required at CA. Accounting practices changed and allowed future revenues to be more carefully built into the equations for the marketeers, and licensing terms changed. Goodwill became something worth keeping. There are still lock-ins relating to migration, but at least the attack on your technology costs was no longer quite so vociferous.

The Open Source Advantage

There have been many hugely successful Open Source applications created, and they’re causing a real stir in the marketplace. Open Office from Sun, Linux - now supported, promoted and used by IBM amongst others, the Apache webserver which is the most popular web server in the world and used by this site amongst others, mySQL which now forms the database behind many great sites…. In fact, if you haven’t used Open Source software as an end-user at some point in your surfing or working life then you’re probably unsure about what this Interweb thingy is.

The whole Open Source initiative creates new challenges and opportunities to the technology user. The biggest advantage is that the code supplied under a Open license is… well, just that. Open. That means that in anything we supply to you under this license you have the right to the computer code behind it. That means several great things:

• If the code is in the public domain, other people can pick it up and improve on it or change it.
• That means that if the supplier goes bust, other people can freely pick up the pieces.
• Similarly, if your supplier tries to tie you in to proprietary changes to your open software then they themselves are breaking the terms of the license. That means you can sue for costs. A supplier can sell open source software, but they can’t close it afterwards - once a piece of code is open, it stays open.
• Because the source is open, if it’s a successful product a wider range of people will be inspecting that source for problems and efficiencies. In theory this should lead to a stronger, more secure product.
• If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, it’s free. Companies supplying open source software make their money through offering supplementary services.

Then again, there are disadvantages:

• Because anybody can cheaply release open source software, or modified versions, anybody can. Finding the quality products out there can be tricky.
• Because of the rather technical community that tends to use open source software, some of it can be very powerful but also very difficult to install and use.
• There isn’t necessarily a big company backing the product, which means it may not be able to maintain the development thrust of rival offerings from groups like Microsoft or Oracle. It isn’t always the case, however - OpenOffice, a free and open rival to Microsoft Office, was originally developed by Sun and they are still the license holders.
• If you receive open source software for free, it’s unwarranted. That means that if there are any problems for which there isn’t a fix, you’re on your own unless you pay someone to fix this.

In summary, Open Source Software removes some of the risks from the software implementation equation. But it does introduce some new ones that you must be aware of. Make sure that you’re not saddled with esoteric, poorly supported software, and make sure that it’s something for which there are enough specialists out there that finding a new one won’t induce shocking prices.

How to Avoid Lock-In

You almost certainly will have to use proprietary software at some point in your business. Most do - for example there are no corporate level Open Source ERP systems available that I would feel comfortable recommending to a large company just yet although here at ICIT we’re carrying out research into products such as ERP5 and Compiere. And if you work a lot with documents from clients you may really need to stick with Microsoft’s Office suite.

So the key to avoiding lock-in isn’t about keeping away from proprietary systems. Instead it’s about looking at the contracts you sign, the technologies you use, and the companies you’re dealing with.

For example, if you use industry standard methods for accessing data - eg, SQL, then migrating from a SQLServer implementation to an Oracle or mySQL database should only be quite painful, rather than the heavy development costs you might face moving from an old Adabas system to… well, anything else really.

Similarly, if you have to license software on renewal, make sure that the contracts don’t allow the vendor to increment the price significantly year on year. If they do you may find yourself spending a fortune, and any migration - even with nice, cuddly open source systems, will cost you.