Apple's Plan to Provide the Best Darned Windows Experience Anywhere Even Better Than Microsoft 3754

In much of the real world, vendor lock-in is not a problem, because projects have finite lifetimes. For example, currently at work, we are doing a project that will last about a year. At the start of it, we need to make some extensive diagrams. During the initial phases of the project, these diagrams will be changing. Then they will become reference documents, and won't need editing. When the project completes, they documents will be of historical interest only.

So, we've got a choice. Let the people doing the diagrams use Visio while the documents are being edited, and export to PDF for distribution. Or use some less capable, but free, diagramming software.

If we go with Visio, we suffer *temporary* vendor lock-in, for the duration of the phases where the documents are being edited. When those phases are done, in a couple of months, we will have no need to touch Visio again for that project. So, what is the downside of this temporary lock-in? I don't see any. There's a big upside: we get to use the best tool for the job at hand.

Using inferior software in order to avoid vendor lock-in, when that vendor-lock in would cause no problems whatsoever, is not sound engineering practice.

-- --Tim Smith