But the ease of achieving lock-in is much higher with IT than in many other areas of business.

For instance a restaurant-goer isn't locked into any particular restaurant. Ford is not generally locked in to any particular parts supplier.

That other areas of business want to achieve lock-in is natural. When Coke is in a position to nail a restaurant that sold Pepsi as Coke, they force them to only sell soft-drinks from Coca-Cola. Nice profit opportunity there. Your airline is trying to do the same with a frequent-flyer program.

And when you get to other technology businesses, the same dynamics that drive it in IT are at work.

However software is special. Software lock-in tends to be harder to avoid, and other business factors (such as significant per unit manufacturing costs) are missing, making management of lock-in a more significant dynamic than otherwise.

As for your snide comment about Microsoft, I'd hope you would give me more credit than that. Or did you think that I didn't know that Microsoft learned directly from IBM?

Cheers,
Ben