Open Data Alliance Centre

Standards are important, they avoid duplication of effort and increase interactivity between various different devices. Imagine if every TV network broadcast it's own standard of TV signal, so you'd need a different TV for each network, or cars were made with their own standard of petrol so you had to fill up at a petrol station who sold fuel for your brand of car. This is the retarded world of vendor lock-in, it's what happens when companies put their own profits above the needs of their customers.

Companies who build their products and services with vendor lock-in baked deep within the DNA want to control their own little islands and demand that you can only play on their terms.

This can be their own proprietary connector sockets and plugs, or generic plugs and sockets but wired differently to give the appearance of a regular connection when regular generic cables won't work with it. Luckily they do come to the rescue by selling those cables, unluckily they can charge what they like for them, since there is no competition for the customer.

This can be in the way that a piece of software writes a data file, that it hooks deep into specific functions of the OS it's running on, that it can't emulate onto another OS, or that there are software patents in play to be used aggressively against anyone who tries to create conversion applications or comparable applications to read or write those data formats. The data formats themselves are the lock-in, companies don't spend a fortune developing them and locking them down just to allow others to come along and open the cage door to let the prisoners escape.

This is the point of vendor lock-in, it's to avoid having to compete, with vendor lock-in, you win by default, because the customer has no choice; they are locked-in.

Companies who build vendor lock-in into their products and services, like to create their own little islands. They like to sell businesses places on their little islands as partners, who help develop and spread their lock-in. That way they have control over their partners, they can increase the cost of licensing fees, or the conditions of the licensing knowing that the partner has invested a lot of money in it, and will likely just pay up instead of finding a more equal partner or technology. When you combine that with the marketing campaign of "everything we don't make infringes on our patents, and we're could sue anyone at any time" it heaps pressure on the "just sign it" moment. The real message is "we could sue YOU if you dare to use any other technology than ours"; yes, you've guessed it, it's vendor lock-in again. This time it's target is partner lock-in. When companies treat their own partners like this, what does that suggest about the contempt they hold their customers needs in?

How many companies were sold the dream about intranets built to only work with IE6? How many of these companies, or at least the IT departments in those companies are ruing that day, because they're stuck with an unsupported, VERY insecure web browser that they have to isolate from everything in the vain hope that it's not an entry point for their network. How many of these IT staff have been tearing their hair out trying to get time and money to rebuild their intranet and the applications their company relies on to not be locked to IE6? How many of these applications were also sold on the "proprietary is good for you" mindset, where the IT department can't do anything with the code, they're reliant on the goodwill of the vendors who sold them the software to do it, and slaved to the cost they want to charge for the privilege? Again we come back to the closed data formats, where software creates it's own formats athat no other software can read, write or convert, which is just another layer of being locked-in.

Some companies have seen the solution, as FOSS advocates have seen for many years. The key is in data format standards. I'm writing this post on Debian Linux in PyRoom, and saving it as a plain text file. If PyRoom suddenly becomes annoying with popups, nagware, or switches to OSX only what does that mean for me? Well, my documents are all plain text, which is one of many open standards so it can be opened, edited etc in any plain text editor. If I feel that PyRoom offers me something unique (which I think it does) and that unique selling point is more important than others (which it's not) then I have the option of switching from Debian Linux to OSX to continue using it. As a FOSS advocate, switching to OSX would never happen, that'd be like a free lovin' hippy joining the Tea Party. The point is that data standards offer the customer choice of where he or she wants to go, and which companies or services to use.

One of the "reasons" Microsoft often give in their attacks / smears on their competition is that they "don't work right with standard formats". Of course by "standard formats" they mean "Microsoft created, patented, licensed and undocumented formats". So of course any office application has to try and reverse engineer .doc and .xls to get them to work. Microsoft were heavily fined for ignoring a court order to release (in this case smb / Samba) documentation to allow others to make their software compatible with Microsoft's own. Again vendor lock-in in full effect.

Open standards are often subverted by companies who like vendor lock-in who submit their own, with all sorts of promises which rings of the abusive husband "I promise I won't hospitalise you again honey, I really do love you", knowing it's only a matter of time before the fists come back out. Promises they have no intention of keeping, and all sorts of hidden hooks to ensure that the standard is accepted and spread, while extending it to ensure it is not compatible with anything else other than their own. They want the badge of "open standard" while in reality it's more vendor lock-in. The other common one they like to pull is not to tell anyone they have patents on something until it's been accepted and widely spread, at which point they send the lawyers out with settlement demands "we own patents on this technology, either pay up of we sue you" knowing most companies can't afford to fight, even if they're in the right. Look at FAT as a prime example, it's THE standard for USB devices, and patented by Microsoft, or MP3, licensed by the MPEG-LA group.

Some companies have seen that standards are a good thing for everyone except those companies who believe in the little island approach; they've seen the cloud gathering, and the same companies who promised (deceived) them (vendor locked-in) miracles before are gearing up to establish their own little islands in cloud computing. They see the obvious, that while the concept of the cloud has it's merits, the vendor lock-in part is retarded and counter to their needs.

I saw a story today about a group of 70 large companies are collectively using their buying clout to force hardware vendors to work with standards and accept a diverse world, called the Open Data Alliance Centre. In the middle of this story I saw a comment which jumped out at me as "Microsoft by proxy", where some third party commentator, blogger or consultant gives some diresroy comment to sew doubt on a story which would go against Microsoft's ethos, or laud it as the future if Microsoft are going in the same direction. It's never Microsoft directly, it's always a proxy with no stated conflict of interest.

"We believe like so many alliances, it will be riven by dissensions and self interest. But we could be wrong, and it could turn out to be like the League of Nations." - Adamson Rust of TechEye.

I have no idea who TechEye are, and after that comment, I'd imagine some connection to at least one of the companies who rely on vendor lock-in like Microsoft.

The end of the story is very telling too in who are NOT part of it; Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Apple. Microsoft and Apple you'd expect, and Yahoo were reamed from the inside by Microsoft so you can understand why they're not included. Amazon have their own little island in their Kindle ebook reader among other things, but Google surprise me.

I did notice an example of how vendor lock-in companies would like to solve the problem in the IBM part.

"IBM launched its own open cloud initiative last year and earlier this week unveiled its cloud computing lab in the UK with the aim of helping partners reap the benefits of the cloud."

Notice the use of the word "open", and who it's aimed at helping; "their partners". Guess who sets the conditions under which partners are allowed to play? Yep, it's IBM. This is about companies seeing the deceptions of the past, and doing something positive to avoid repeating them, despite the sales / legal pitch of the established status quo.