Exclusive proprietary systems

Corporations tend to seek ways of locking clients into long-term dependency on proprietary technologies or services as a way of preventing them from going to competitors for alternative or related products. Corporations are then able to impose prices and conditions to their own advantage.

The prime example is the effort by early manufacturers of computers to ensure that clients could not make any use of products or software manufactured by competitors. This stranglehold was largely broken with the proliferation of personal computers. It has re-emerged at the level of operating system software.