> Perhaps also society has become more conservative, so selling a really innovative product to a customer has become harder.
Customers are more locked into existing products. Network effects, switching costs, familiarity and branding, staff training (for businesses) and learning something new....
I'd claim that also before the customers were locked into existing product. What is different is that in former days they were much more willing to get away from this lock-in.
The reason for this that I consider to be the most plausible one is that society has become more conservative (i.e. less willing to change things or try out new things).
Lock is has been a problem for a long time, but I think the lock in is stronger. You have dependencies between multiple systems, dependencies between systems, data that is no longer stored locally on machines you control, etc.
Strongly agree here that there is platform lock-in; all the large platforms are playing subtle games to make it harder to explore new services outside them.
To some people this might look like consumers are more conservative, but really it's just hidden dark patterns keeping them in the big platforms.
I really wish the US government was more pro-business competition; they're merely pro-business in terms of ensuring existing winners continue to win. Across the pond, the EU seems to get this with measures like GDPR which make it actually easier to port between platforms.
> Strongly agree here that there is platform lock-in; all the large platforms are playing subtle games to make it harder to explore new services outside them.
> To some people this might look like consumers are more conservative, but really it's just hidden dark patterns keeping them in the big platforms.
I personally observe that people have quite different "sensitivities" to this phenomenon. It might be true that such people exist, but at least in my "echo chamber" it's rather exactly the other way: the more dark pattern such people observe, and the more they feel "jailed" by these large platforms, the more they are willing to leave the platform - just out of spite. Thus, at least many people of my "echo chamber" show exactly the opposite behaviour from what you claim and the platforms intend.
Thus, I believe the conservatism is a different phenomenon: people become less willing to try out new things because they observed far too often that a new interesting service turned more and more into a dark jail over the years.
Customers are more locked into existing products. Network effects, switching costs, familiarity and branding, staff training (for businesses) and learning something new....