Talk:Vendor lock-in

Is lock-in "bad"?

The article seems to assume, or at least imply, that vendor lock-in is somehow bad, an evil tactic, a problem to be combated. Is this bias intended? Is it right? --Franck 14:06, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Well bad is certainly not correct. It does reduce consumer choice and raise prices, so the consumer utility is lower and the producer's is higher. Is that bad? Well some POV's would certainly say so, but others would not I guess. To be NPOV the article should not reflect one side or the other, simply describe. I see upon re-reading that you are right. There are some POV words in there like combating, and the second half of the article doesn't seem entirely NPOV. See what you can do to make it more neutral without removing correct information. - Taxman 15:39, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

Only anticompetitive practices are evil, as in punishable by competition law. Vendor lock-in is more a result, that may just as well arise from natural causes like path dependence and the gruesome network effect. Are they evil too? The situation is bad for the consumer, which is why many countries have competition regulator bureaus, to take care of the anticompetitive practices. But if you ask me, the natural effects are just as evil (hence rather underprioritized) – the result is the same. —84.214.220.135 (talk) 19:25, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

Bias in reference links?

It seems odd to me that at the end of a page giving an overview of Vendor Lock-in that there are 5 refeence links, 3 of which are by the same pair of economists, who basically disagree with everything on the page. They're famous for arguing that the best technology won out in VHS vs. Betamax and Dvork vs QWERTY keyboards (i.e. disputing classic examples of lock-in), but that just reflects their general belief that market forces always produce the best result. Such views are popular in certain economic/political circles but don't seem like mainstream thought to me (speaking as an economics graduate from the UK). Their view that Microsoft wasn't a damaging monopoly abuser of lock-in is not a generally accepted concept, for example.

If the links are to remain it would be better if there was a section for criticism of 'vendor lock-in' where the arguments against 'vendor lock-in' could be presented, and perhaps more than one pair of researchers can be found that argue this point. [2006-02-13 00:17:30 86.17.163.244]

Standard English please

Please could someone edit the sentence "At the time Apple was stated to have an 80% market share of digital music sales and a 90% share of sales of new music players, which he claimed allowed Apple to horizontally leverage its dominant positions in both markets to lock consumers into its complementary offerings." to avoid the nonsensical phrase "horizontally leverage"? "Leverage" is not a verb and makes no sense in this context. I would edit it myself but I haven't got a clue what it means. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pigeon.dyndns.org (talk • contribs) 19:10, 27 March 2006

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=leverage —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.175.20.66 (talk • contribs) 02:16, 1 April 2006

the above link explains the usage in the article, but whoever placed it here didn't mention that. I do think that link makes it clear that to a business person, horizontal leverage is a well understood concept, so we shoud prolly just remove this whole subsection, but I'm a newbie and don't know etiquette for that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.160.128.228 (talk • contribs) 19:54, 5 May 2006

Error AAC

AAC could be played on other devices, for example in a Windows OS, several mediaplayers support AAC. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.132.75.218 (talk) 12:41, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Adobe PDF

Adobe PDF comes to mind. I'll bet we can find a reliable source mentioning it. Perhaps this explains why as of 2022, the format is ubiquitous yet there are no free full-featured editing programs (Adobe Acrobat equivalent free programs). –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:28, 1 August 2022 (UTC)