The biggest incentive to lock down wasn't listed. It's economic.
If you can guide, or shoehorn, people into using your service, and it's 'good enough,' you can make a lot more money than if you're doing custom one-offs for everyone, or writing a bunch of potentially buggy code for different variations, or having your team troubleshoot integrations. An important point too is that, if one person sees another person using the app, and it's a standard unified experience, that helps its spread too.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair. I personally would vote for not locking products down, but that's what we're up against.
I've long believed this to be the reason that component-oriented software never went anywhere back in the 90's. You could make _some_ money selling components. But you could make _tons_ of money selling a walled-off set of pre-integrated components as an office suite.
Comments
The biggest incentive to lock down wasn't listed. It's economic.
If you can guide, or shoehorn, people into using your service, and it's 'good enough,' you can make a lot more money than if you're doing custom one-offs for everyone, or writing a bunch of potentially buggy code for different variations, or having your team troubleshoot integrations. An important point too is that, if one person sees another person using the app, and it's a standard unified experience, that helps its spread too.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair. I personally would vote for not locking products down, but that's what we're up against.
I've long believed this to be the reason that component-oriented software never went anywhere back in the 90's. You could make _some_ money selling components. But you could make _tons_ of money selling a walled-off set of pre-integrated components as an office suite.