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Could your company become a victim of vendor lock-in? If you rely entirely on proprietary software, you very well could be. What exactly is this vendor lock-in of which I speak? It is a way of ensuring that you, the consumer, will only be able to use specific products as set forth by select manufacturers.

A classic, old-school example of vendor lock-in would have to be with ink jet printer cartridges. When you purchase any major brand of ink jet printer, you will be stuck relying on ink they themselves produce, no matter how hard you might wish to use something else.

Another example is some "pre-fab" computers coming from Dell, HP, and so on. In many instances, you are stuck with power supply units that do not conform to something that might otherwise be available from the local PC repair store. Often times the motherboards are also custom to this extent as well, thus forcing you to use replacements from a single source, rather than being free to select a motherboard from the source of your choosing.

But all of this is forgivable as to some extent. Even if it takes some changes, you can escape this kind of restrictive lock-in. Even if it simply means buying new hardware, you can at least get company-critical data off of the device and onto another one of their choosing. As for printers, that is a simple one as well. Just make sure to purchase something else altogether.

Yet when it comes to software, it's a whole different animal.

No transferability for you!

One of my favorite examples of painful vendor lock-in has to be with the various Microsoft Office products. And the worst offender from the lot is Microsoft Publisher. Now, let's say for example that you are back in 2002. And you are at work where you have a brand new installation of Publisher 2002 on your desktop.

Back at the home office, you have your trusty copy of Publisher 2000, which you will be using later on that same evening. At work, you just created a copy of a mission-critical document that was created with the new 2002 software. But due to time constraints, you'll need to take this home to be worked on in greater detail without the hustle and bustle of the workplace to interfere with your creativity.

So you get home, take out your Flash drive and retrieve the Publisher document as to get started with it.

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