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Great article, it expresses my own thoughts and attitude very well. I understand why companies aim for this lock-in, but I believe that the question to ask is: why are such companies successful with such lock-in based products? I believe that they are successful with such strategies because of the lack of matching alternatives that offer the same usability for the majority of users. And when talking about usability I explicitly include the aspect of operation management. With cloud-based solutions, operation management is effectively zero from a user perspective. During the past 10-20 years, the web has evolved significantly w.r.t. content rendering, content authoring, and content transport solutions. Today people can very easily watch movies, read articles, listen to music, or write articles, upload movies, and share music themselves. At the same time, the web did not (or only slightly) evolve in its underlying architecture. It does not provide the primitives required to bring content producers and consumers directly together. If you are a content producer, you either need to use a centralized service operated by a third party, or you need to have the technical skills to setup and operate your own IT-infrastructure. The effect of this gap is even more significant if you look at todays users. Since they have multiple devices, the become content producers on one device, and their own content consumer on the next device. While technically skilled people could easily implement own alternatives (that run on their desktop) in the past to get away from online services and protect their privacy, they are faced with the challenge that such an application needs to feature smart synchronization among multiple devices in order to provide the same level of usability. |