Most CIO's feel the squeeze of hardware or software lock-in at some point, the overt or covert mechanisms which keep us from easily switching between technology products. For quite a long time, lock-in was more a function of the limitations of technology than any explicit efforts on the part of technology manufacturers; you couldn't easily move between your VAX and a System/3 because neither was sophisticated enough to easily adapt the files and protocols of the other, nor were their various applications.

Today, lock-in has become more explicit as technology has become more universal, as Bruce Schneier discusses in this Wired article on the subject. Bruce illustrates the principle using the recent and worthy example of the iPhone; but from a corporate perspective the larger concern are some other examples he touches on, including Microsoft's Palladium, which will serve to lock you into your software and hardware purchases even as the maturation of Service Oriented Architectures promise to free you from such inconveniences.

You may or may not already know that the real value of a software company is the degree of lock-in it holds customers in. Schneier cites the study that proved it, but most of us intuitively understand that the reason that companies get away with churning out crap is that we have to buy it... it's more expensive to move to something better (not looking at the fullness of time, of course, but then most companies don't). On the other hand, it costs money to develop that something better. If the company which might build the better mousetrap doesn't have the option of also locking you into it, then there is no value in developing it.

All this points to the need for a different model of technology development and compensation, but I don't know what it is and neither does Schneier, who is much brighter than I am. We'll have to see if the market comes up with something, or if we continue to have to deal with such artificial limitations in our technology.