bangersandmash

Sean Devine has written a piece about the iPhone app store in which he notes that,

The KEY to maximizing iPhone profit is to create very high switching costs for users, just as they did for the iPod via the iTunes Music Store. Apple is using the App Store to create switching costs, and they know that if all of their users have “invested” in many little applications that will only work on the iPhone (a la songs from the iTunes Music Store), they will eventually have users locked in to a long-term investment in the iPhone franchise. [source: Deal Range]

I think he’s on to something here, but I’m not talking about the app store. I’ve recently had an experience where a non-monetary cost of switching caused me to continue using an slightly inferior product.

In mid-December I started playing around the with Opera 10 alpha and the WebKit nightly builds. Incredibly nerdy for someone not in web design but these things interest me. Both browsers are able to render a page incredibly quickly — faster than the current version of Safari that I use. Opera, however, really caught my attention and the more I played with it the more I found it becoming my primary browser.

During my two week winter vacation I found myself using Opera for just about everything and figured that I had once again found myself listed as an Opera convert. Until I had to go back to work. On that fateful Monday morning I plugged in my iPod to sync up all of my important data and suddenly realized that by using Opera I would no longer be able to have my bookmarks updated on my iPod.

I hadn’t been doing much mobile browsing while on vacation so I hadn’t noticed that the bookmarks were out of date. I don’t even use bookmarks very much but this was enough to make me think twice about my little dalliance with a third-party browser. Despite all that I gained by using Opera, the threat of having to type in URLs in mobile Safari was enough to bring my back into Apple’s sandbox.

I’m still wavering on this decision. This isn’t about a purchase making the cost of switching too high (as in Devine’s piece), but about a fairly trivial piece of functionality driving up the cost of switching. I really do need to let myself be comfortable with the fact that Opera is the better browser.