Mental Lock-in : The most subtle, but also the most dangerous type of lock-in is the one that affects your thinking. After working with a certain set of vendors and architectures, you are likely to absorb assumptions into your decision making, which may lead you to reject alternative options. For example, you may reject scale-out architectures as
Vendor Lock-in : This is the kind that IT folks generally mean when they mention "lock-in". It describes the difficulty of switching from one vendor to a competitor. For example, if migrating from Siebel CRM to SalesForce CRM or from an IBM DB2 database to an Oracle one will cost you an arm and a leg, you are "locked in". This type of lock-in is