Don't get locked up into avoiding lock-in

There is a lot of value in services that pull everything together in one place, but over time that value starts to recede, the lock-ins keeping people there weaken and the appeal of having separate, specialised products grows.

1. The decline of platform lock-in: The blessing (for the company) and curse (for the customer) of most Web2 businesses is lock-in — your most important data stays on the platform where you created it.

It's up to the architect to foresee these outcomes and decide whether they are comfortable with them. Does it matter where this lands, or does it make sense to constrain the available choices in some way? Will this make life easier in the long term and help you to manage costs, or will it merely undermine agility without delivxering any tangible be... See more