05.02.07
Potatoes Prove: Vendor Lock-In Is A Bad Thing
Erwin’s StarOffice Tango » Locked-in by a potato
One month prior to the expiration of the PBR certificate in December 2004, Europlant ceased maintenance of the variety, even though its registration on the national list was valid until 2009. This means that no one else could take over maintenance of the variety because it was still under PBR at the time — meaning Europlant had the only rights to produce the variety. So Linda was marked for deletion from the German potato market.
PBR, or plant breeder’s rights, appears to be a kind of exclusive rights period, similar in concept to US plant patents. Shortly before PBR expired, when no one else was allowed to cultivate it, the vendor pulled a popular variety of potato off the market.
Now imagine having software that uses vendor-specific file formats or network protocols. Shortly before competitors are able to make a work-alike product, the market-leading vendor is probably going to do a shift in file formats or protocols for no other reason than to block competition, even though the competition is good for the purchaser or end-user.
Smaller businesses especially have little need to spend large sums of money on software applications with generic functionality, such as office application suites. As a user, I have seen almost zero improvement in office software since I purchased WordPerfect Office Professional 7 in 1997. Microsoft had almost caught up in functionality with their Office 2003 product six or seven years later. However, since Microsoft probably has over 90% of office application software purchases (thousands of people download OpenOffice.org and similar zero-price suites, but actual purchases of non-Microsoft products are a fairly small slice of the market up until now), there has been almost no improvement in the product area.
What has happened is that they have become adept at making minor, slightly-incompatible changes in their file formats from version to version, forcing users to purchase upgrades when their existing software still meets their needs. This happens because they do not use an open and cross-platform , vendor-neutral, standardized file format for the products–they could not play those games any more and their prices would have to be reduced.
I found the documentary fascinating because I, probably for the first time, realized that open competition and vendor lock-in are a key issue of the food sector as well and thus everybody should care. Sure, if a vendor takes your favorite potato from the market, you can easily switch to a different potato type because I’m not aware of any “potato addictions”. This is very different for software where vendors oftent ry to lock in customers via proprietary file formats and interfaces, which often make switching to different products costly or even impossible.
This shows clearly why you should never go with a single-vendor solution. You should always insist on multiple vendors’ products and a standardized set of vendor-independent file formats and network protocols to connect them with.
In office software, you should insist that your software comes with built-in support for OpenDocument Format (ODF), the recognized standard formats for office documents. If your vendor cannot or will not support ODF, you can download OpenOffice.org or contact Sun to find a reseller of StarOffice. Your personal or company data may depend upon it.
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