They don't want me switching away, but they should also recognize that programmers like me are lazy/smart enough that I'm much more likely to switch to their service if I know I can easily switch away.
(But being lazy, I'm not going to switch away from them on a whim. Even if the interface is the same, there's still a cost to the testing and such that would be needed. I mostly want to know that there would be a reasonable migration path.)
Joel Spolsky made this point about Excel once ("Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!"): its adoption really took off once people could write 123 files.
That's an interesting point but I think it works more in favor of small providers trying to gain market share rather than incumbents.
Amazon's strategy with AWS seems to be to hype it so much that anybody who isn't using it feels like they are some sort of neanderthal since everyone talks about how everything is moving "to the cloud".
Interesting that he uses Excel as an example since I imagine (I haven't used Excel for a while) that saving data in a modern version of Excel makes it incompatible with anything else (at least it would do if OpenOffice didn't reverse engineer the format).
The format didn't need to be reversed, it's (almost) open. Additionally there are plugins for the older versions of Office to let them work with the newer format, and it's much much easier to write tools to do things with Word files now - just crack one open and take a look (it's a .zip file full of XML files).
(But being lazy, I'm not going to switch away from them on a whim. Even if the interface is the same, there's still a cost to the testing and such that would be needed. I mostly want to know that there would be a reasonable migration path.)
Joel Spolsky made this point about Excel once ("Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!"): its adoption really took off once people could write 123 files.