The Lock-in / Break-out Cycle
"This has all happened before. This will all happen again." - a refrain from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica science fiction series that is painfully accurate in the software world. This is not always ideal, but it is reality.
We have a serious problem with vendor lock-in -- and this is an old, constantly recurring problem in technology. In the dark ages of the web, there were first a gazillion individual websites - then a tendency towards a few online blogger/journaling communities (LiveJournal? GeoCities? Blogspot?).
