The use of open standards and alternative options makes systems tolerant of change, so that decisions can be postponed until more information is available or unforeseen events are addressed.
This class of lock-in is potentially technologically hard to overcome if the monopoly is held up by barriers to market that are nontrivial to circumvent, such as patents, secrecy, cryptography or other technical hindrances.
However, the personal variant is also a possible permutation of the variations shown in the table, but with no monopoly and no collectivity, it would be expected to be the weakest lock-in.
As one blogger expressed:[3] If I stopped using Skype, I'd lose contact with many people, because it's impossible to make them all change to [other] software.While MP3 is patent-free as of 2017, in 2001 it was both patented and entrenched, as noted by Richard Stallman in that year (in justifying a lax license for Ogg Vorbis):[4] there is […] the danger that people will settle on MP3 format even though it is patented, and we won't be *allowed* to write free encoders for the most popular format.
And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead.
This may make it easier for competitors to write documents compatible with Microsoft Office in the future by reducing lock-in.
[citation needed] Microsoft released full descriptions of the file formats for earlier versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in February 2008.
As a result, that music was locked into this ecosystem and available for portable use only through the purchase of one of the above devices,[7] or by burning to CD and optionally re-ripping to a DRM-free format such as MP3 or WAV.
He stated in his brief: "Apple has turned an open and interactive standard into an artifice that prevents consumers from using the portable hard drive digital music player of their choice.
These files are unprotected and are encoded in the AAC format at 256 kilobits per second, twice the bitrate of standard tracks bought through the service.
[clarification needed] As of January 6, 2009, all four big music studios (Warner Bros., Sony BMG, Universal, and EMI) have signed up to remove the DRM from their tracks, at no extra cost.