The reason switching costs are designed, not incidental

A service makes it easy to upload your contacts, your files and your history. Downloading the same data later, in a format another service can read, is either impossible or buried behind five settings screens. The path in was lit; the path out was not.

What everyone sees

The difficulty of leaving is attributed to technical complexity: data formats differ, migration is hard, engineering resources are limited. The possibility that the difficulty is the product — that the cost of switching was designed to be high — is discussed by critics but not by the firm’s documentation.

What is actually happening

Klemperer described switching costs as a source of market power: a firm that raises the cost of leaving can charge a premium to staying customers without losing them. Farrell and Klemperer formalised the relationship between switching costs and competition, showing that installed-base lock-in reduces the effective competition a firm faces. Zhu and Iansiti showed that data portability (or its absence) is a deliberate architectural choice with strategic implications. Import tools are investments in acquisition; export tools are concessions to competition.

Why it stays hidden

The design hides behind the passive voice: the export feature is “not yet available” or “on the roadmap,” and the language implies that the absence is temporary and unintended. The import feature, by contrast, was available at launch. The asymmetry is visible in the timeline — import first, export never — but each absence on its own sounds like an engineering prioritisation rather than a strategy.