Жеткізушіге тәуелділік және ауысу құнының кедергілері

Switching costs inhibiting a change of vendor

In economics, vendor lock in, also known as proprietary lock in or customer lock in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs. The use of open standards and alternative options makes systems tolerant of change, so that decisions can be postponed until more information is available or unforeseen events are addressed. Vendor lock in does the opposite: it makes it difficult to move from one solution to another. Lock in costs that create barriers to market entry may result in antitrust action against a monopoly.

Technology lock in, as defined, is strictly of the collective kind. However, the personal variant is also a possible permutation of the variations shown in the table, but with no monopoly and no collectivity, it would be expected to be the weakest lock in. Equivalent personal examples:
A person who has become proficient on QWERTY keyboards will have an incentive to continue using QWERTY keyboards. A car owner has an incentive to make use of their car, because using it is cheap compared to the total cost of car ownership; the car is said to be a sunk cost. A person who has ripped their CD collection to MP3 will have an incentive to prefer audio equipment that supports this format; and vice versa, for personal investment reasons, has an incentive to continue ripping to this format. A person who has most of their multimedia equipment interconnected with HDMI will tend to seek HDMI compatibility to all their other multimedia capable equipment (although this is a far less severe case of lock in than those above, due to the wide availability of adapters that can be used to connect HDMI equipment to and from—for instance—DVI or DisplayPort equipment).

Prior to March 2009, digital music files with digital rights management were available for purchase from the iTunes Store, encoded in a proprietary derivative of the AAC format that used Apple's FairPlay DRM system. These files are compatible only with Apple's iTunes media player software on Macs and Windows, their iPod portable digital music players, iPhone smartphones, iPad tablet computers, and the Motorola ROKR E1 and SLVR mobile phones. As a result, that music was locked into this ecosystem and available for portable use only through the purchase of one of the above devices, or by burning to CD and optionally re ripping to a DRM free format such as MP3 or WAV. In January, 2005, an iPod purchaser named Thomas Slattery filed a suit against Apple for the "unlawful bundling" of their iTunes Music Store and iPod device. He stated in his brief: "Apple has turned an open and interactive standard into an artifice that prevents consumers from using the portable hard drive digital music player of their choice." 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. In September 2005, U. S. District Judge James Ware approved Slattery v. Apple Computer Inc. to proceed with monopoly charges against Apple in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. On June 7, 2006, the Norwegian Consumer Council stated that Apple's iTunes Music Store violates Norwegian law. The contract conditions were vague and "clearly unbalanced to disfavor the customer". The retroactive changes to the DRM conditions and the incompatibility with other music players are the major points of concern. In an earlier letter to Apple, consumer ombudsman Bjørn Erik Thon complained that iTunes' DRM mechanism was a lock in to Apple's music players, and argued that this was a conflict with consumer rights that he doubted would be defendable by Norwegian copyright law. as of 2007, tracks on the EMI label became available in a DRM free format called iTunes Plus. These files are unprotected and are encoded in the AAC format at 256 kilobits per second, twice the bitrate of standard tracks bought through the service. iTunes accounts can be set to display either standard or iTunes Plus formats for tracks where both formats exist. These files can be used with any player that supports the AAC file format and are not locked to Apple hardware. They can be converted to MP format if desired. As of January 6, 2009, all four big music studios (Warner Bros., Sony BMG, Universal, and EMI) have signed up to remove the DRM from their tracks, at no extra cost. However, Apple charges consumers to have previously purchased DRM music restrictions removed.

Although Google has stated its position in favor of interoperability, the company has taken steps away from open protocols replacing open standard Google Talk by proprietary protocol Google Hangouts. Also, Google's Data Liberation Front has been inactive on Twitter since 2013 and its official website, www. dataliberation. org, now redirects to a page on Google's FAQs, leading users to believe the project has been closed. Google's mobile operating system Android is open source; however, the operating system that comes with the phones that most people actually purchase in a store is more often than not shipped with many of Google's proprietary applications that promote users to use only Google services.

Many printer manufacturers claim that if any ink cartridges, beyond those sold by themselves, are used in the printer, the warranty of the printer becomes void. Lexmark tried to go further, making ink cartridges containing an authentication system, the purpose of which was intended to make it illegal in the United States (under the DMCA) for a competitor to make an ink cartridge compatible with Lexmark printers. The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held in 2004 that third parties replicating such devices purely to make their cartridges interface with printers does not in fact violate the DMCA. Test strips for glucose meters are typically made for a specific make or model. Strips designed for Accu chek devices, for example, are incompatible with meters from other manufacturers. This lack of standardization can lead to problems especially in developing countries, where glucose meters and their associated strips are a scarce commodity. Some companies, despite claiming to have lifetime warranty on their products, stop making specific models and their respective strips so that even those who have a good functioning model have to buy a new model. The K Cup single serving coffee pod system was covered by a patent owned by Keurig, which is a subsidiary of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, and no other manufacturer could create K Cup packs compatible with Keurig coffee makers without a license from Keurig. While the company does have patents on improvements to the system, the original K Cup patents expired in September 2012. Other single serving coffee brands, such as Nespresso, also have proprietary systems. Lens mounts of competing camera manufacturers are almost always incompatible. Therefore, a photographer with a set of lens mounts of a certain manufacturer will prefer not to buy a camera from another manufacturer. Nvidia, as of 2018, still only supports the proprietary Nvidia G Sync despite the availability of the open Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) standard Adaptive Sync technology (FreeSync). In January 2019, Nvidia announced that it will advance compatibility of its video cards with FreeSync compatible monitors. Some cordless tool manufacturers make batteries that fit only their own brand of tools, and often are not backwards compatible. Often multiple brands are owned by the same company, and share tool designs and features, accessories and batteries are deliberately changed to make them incompatible. An example would be Stanley Black & Decker who also owns or manufactures Black & Decker, DeWalt, Porter Cable, Mastercraft, and Craftsman. All use almost identical batteries, yet all have some feature designed to stop use in other tools. Dell laptops will 'throttle', or limit the processing speed available to the end user, if genuine Dell OEM power supplies are not used with their devices (Users are presented with the warning: "The AC adapter type cannot be determined. This will prevent optimal system performance. ").