This is a very narrow understanding about what businesses do. They don't think of things that lock in users. They think of features that people will want to use. Solutions to peoples problems, even ones they didn't know they had.
So if you're good enough at that, people have trouble giving up your platform or service. Calling it lock in is just good features and service in a negative light.
"Oh, Apple does great to replace things when they break, but it's just lock in. It's not actually good service."
Creating switching costs is in fact a regular market strategy and is certainly more than just doing something so well that people will have trouble giving it up.
Facebook has switching costs because all your friends are on it, not on another network, plus you'd have to learn a whole new set of privacy settings, right? The Kindle has switching costs because all your books are in your Kindle library and you can't transfer them to the Nook. Moving has switching costs because you have to give people a new address, learn a new neighborhood, memorize new driving routes, etc.
Strong businesses often have very natural switching costs built in.
There will always be a switching cost, even just remembering a new URL.
Surely companies do things to make the switching cost higher. Like as you said, locking ebooks to a particular device.
But creating a service or feature that is only on your platform just means you're doing something no one else is doing; making you more attractive to consumers (and creating a higher switching cost).
I think one of the biggest reasons your being down-voted is because your confusing the act of creating solutions to problems with what lock-in actually is.
Arguments can be made that because it costs more to switch from one platform to another, that is lock-in. IMO though, lock-in specifically refers to acts where a company intentionally tries to prevent people from moving away from their product or platform, most often manifesting as closed data formats or an inability to extract data that you yourself deposited in a system.
All the features Apple announced today are features that people have been demanding from Apple and any other vendor. What's the lock in?
Putting DRM on music so you can only play it on iPod is lock in.
Though I agree Apple is integrating services into iOS that are only available to iOS.So I imagine that gives them lock in.
I don't want to start trying to guess as Apple's motivations, but I don't see them coming out with demanded features as intentional lock in as it appears to be their solution to the problem.
I never said there was lock-in with this new update, I was pointing out what I perceived to be one of the biggest reasons your comment was down-voted.
From the brief bits and pieces I've read about this, I've heard of nothing so far that smells like lock-in. And I'm by no stretch an Apple fanboy either.
If you have all the features you make the money on the hardware with the features. But describing things as only "lock in" is pretty meaningless as a comment. It implies that all it's doing is increasing switching costs and not actually offering anything to the user.
But it would only increase switching costs in the event that it WAS an attractive feature. Features that are not useful or interesting to users aren't going to affect switching costs, or lock in.
Counterexample: Company X using a proprietary file format for their office suite. This is neither useful nor interesting to users, but definitely creates a lock-in.
So if you're good enough at that, people have trouble giving up your platform or service. Calling it lock in is just good features and service in a negative light.
"Oh, Apple does great to replace things when they break, but it's just lock in. It's not actually good service."