Cory Doctorow on sunk costs and adversarial compatibility.
"There are two groups of people who especially rely on this kind of thing: poor people – especially the global poor – and people with disabilities."
Side note: makes me think about how we may see a rise in flexible platforms (or, more generally, of symbolic steering media), which hug the contours of existing behaviours, awaiting moments when they can poach users, cloaking or displacing sunk costs and making a switch appear like it's just a minor reconfiguration of preferences, rather than a categorical leap. (There are tiny hints of this kind of thing already: "I don't think I really need a MySp-- oh, I can sign in with my Twitter? Okay." "I can't be bothered using Google+; what the hell, all my images are there already ...?")
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