Lock-in 27#
Customers are locked into a vendor's world of products and services. Using another vendor is impossible without incurring substantial switching costs, and thus protecting the company from losing customers. This lock-in is either generated by technological mechanisms or substantial interdependencies of products or services.
Examples: Iconic Cases
How they do it: Lego parts allow individual recombination of the parts. However this recombination is only possible with other official Lego parts and no other toys. This leads to a lock-in for customers, as the size of an existing Lego collection determines also the value of new Lego products, as the recombination possibilities are increasing.
Learn more about Lego →
How they do it: Apple has created an ecosystem of hardware and software combinations. For example can the native music app of the iPhone only be connected through the Apple software iTunes. This creates a lock-in effect, also when the user wants to synchronize other media across devices.
Learn more about Apple iPhone/AppStore →
How they do it: Through the personal nature of a user’s Facebook network of friends, switching costs to other platforms are increased with a larger network of friends on the platform.
Learn more about Facebook →
How they do it: By providing the most used operating system for personal computers, Microsoft has the advantage to create an environment which prefers their other software solutions such as Internet Explorer or the Office package over competing products. Also, the programs on a Microsoft operating system are ususally not compatible with other operating systems from companies such as Apple or Linux. Hence customers have a barrier to switch to another operating system as they would loose their software programs.
Learn more about Microsoft →
How they do it: Data lock-in risks become evident when you need to move your data from one software vendor’s systems or servers to another. Companies using SAP’s software are locked in to the SAP ecosystem and may face difficulities in organizational rigidity and switching costs when deciding to switch to a competitor’s system, leading to a competitive advantage of SAP.
Learn more about SAP →
Below, the top industries for the pattern "Lock-in" are displayed, in order to get insights into how this pattern is applied across different industries. We've collected data from 5 firms using this pattern.
Top Industries
18% of firms using pattern
14% of firms using pattern
14% of firms using pattern
All Industries
Below, the pattern "Lock-in" is analyzed based on co-occurrence, in order to get insights into how this business model pattern is applied in combination with other patterns within the firms we studied.
Top Co-Occurrences
8 pattern co-occurrences
6 pattern co-occurrences
6 pattern co-occurrences