Is vendor lock-in just an excuse for not wanting to innovate and take risks?

Lock-in comes from so many perspectives: cultural, legal, cost, risk, organizational, priorities. All of those are factors that help decide what choices we make through the path.

There is a culture that ends up being created in organizations that tends to be entirely risk averse and that becomes the driver of all decisions, rather than right or wrong, or saving money or wasting money.

Even CSOs view risk as a static entity, here's our risk model, here's the situations that could take down our business. Risk is highly elastic, especially in a cloud-native digitally transformed world. And that risk is always evolving. And unfortunately, most CIO, CSOs CEOs and board members don't view it that way. If you view it as a static entity, you're always looking in arrears and past performance is going to be indicative of future or CRD events. It seems very tactical to talk about vendor lock-in by asking, “where are we trying to solve? And what vendors (or ideally partners) can help us attack that problem and solve it in the most efficient manner?” Do people actually think about it like that? Or are they driven by the CFO and the bottom line? What innovative leader has ever said, “We are going to cost reduce to get innovation”?

I don't know if every business is responsive to immediate massive change. The fact is, people want incrementalism, people need to adjust to the change.

They won't take the disruption that comes with it. They think that there's a magic pill or a magic being that auto-magically will fix the problem. You can come in and go behind closed doors and fix some things and then come back and auto-magically things work again. Never actually works that way.

This is a great discussion.  I'm working with several organizations who are desperate to upgrade 30-year-old applications.  There are individuals who are incensed to make change but they face a lot of internal roadblocks.  Like Tim said, there is not magic pill.