Switching Costs
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What it is
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The financial, practical, or social costs a user incurs when moving from one product or platform to a competing one.
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Intuition
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It's the "pain of leaving" — lost data, lost contacts, lost familiarity — that makes staying put easier than switching, even when the alternative is better.
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How it works
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A platform locks value (files, contacts, purchased content) into formats or systems that only work within it.
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Leaving means giving up some or all of that value.
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The higher this cost, the more a company can degrade its product without losing users, since leaving hurts more than staying.
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Switching costs can be engineered deliberately (proprietary formats, banning interoperable tools) or can be inherent to the product.
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Example
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Leaving a social platform can mean losing years of photos and messages, and — most importantly — the network of friends built there, since that social graph typically isn't portable elsewhere.
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Limitations
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Switching costs can be deliberately lowered by interoperable tools (reverse-engineered format readers, export/import tools) — which is why platforms often try to make such tools illegal rather than merely difficult.
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