Is vendor lock-in really a bad thing? Yes!

Lori MacVittie over on the F5 DevCentral blog, has a post today asking if vendor lock-in is really a bad thing. I say absolutely! Anytime you are given less choice, sooner or later it limits your options.  Lori draws a clear distinction in her article between consumer lock-in as with the iPhone for example, versus data center lock-in (which in my mind is Cisco, but could be F5, HP or any number of others.) Putting aside the issue one commenter made about closed platform versus actual lock-in in regards to the iPhone, lets not even bother with consumer stuff for purposes of this response. Lets look at the data center as Lori does.

Lori says its not bad lock-in if the vendor:  (a) does what it says it does, (b) solves all their problems and (c) the company isn’t going anywhere. I agree monolithic vendor solutions can be quite efficient. Hey Mussolini was loved by the Italian people early on because he made the trains run on time.  That didn’t mean that a fascist form of government was best for Italy and that it was not a bad thing. But a single party dictatorship is more efficient than a democracy usually.  Doesn’t make it befter.

What does this have to do with data center vendor lock-in? I think where Lori’s wheels fall off the tracks on this one is when the vendor uses that monopolistic lock-in to ensure that customers now have to use vendors products for ancillary solutions. Imagine if you will (well you don’t have to imagine, it used to be like this) that if you want to use VOIP and your a Cisco shop, unless you use Cisco VOIP phones they just don't work so well on your Cisco network. Take wireless as another example. Aruba gear in a Cisco shop is a real nightmare.  Now does Cisco purposely make it harder for another vendor's gear to work with their switches? I will leave it to you to decide. The real problem as I see it is when does lock-in become so prohibitive that it crosses over to monopolistic. When it does, we don’t live in a world of corporate saints, so you can’t expect them to do what is best for customers and not for themselves.

Lori also points out that standards are so supposed to alleviate some of that angst. But as Lori says that ain’t a panacea either.  Even within standards there is too much “embracing and extending” that renders them greatly diminished.  Try making 802.1x switches from different vendors work together as a great example.