Even when laws support interoperability ... (Score 1)

Even when laws encourage or support interoperability, you don't get it and the switching cost is enormous. Take a look at EMR, electronic medical records, as an example. There are federal laws that mandate exchange formats and portability of medical records. However, if you ever try to pull something out of EPIC, the largest player in the field, you'll face an enormous challenge. EPIC puts up costly barriers of proprietary licenses and libraries. The big players use different conventions and practices within the standard making sharing or switching a monumental pain. Arguably, the standard may be too loose, and lets the differences proliferate, but the big players have huge sway on how the standards are written use the differences in convention to lock-in their customers for life. Imagine if relational databases for business data were not portable and you had to hire a consultant to get your data out of Oracle and into a spreadsheet.