Take operating systems. Switching from any of Windows, Macintosh, Sun Unix or Linux another poses huge switching costs. These costs include the fact that if you were to swap platforms you would need to buy again desktop applications for the new platform. Perhaps of even greater cost is the valuable data, information and knowledge populated throughout the organization over time within the applications running on a particular platform. Wholesale platform switching means creating translation scheme so that data from the old platform can be accessed and manipulated in the new.
Many enterprises are mixed platform environments.
And such standards as XML stand to ease some of the tension inherent in the inflexibility of much of IT today. Some users will walk through the painful fire of switching because the long-term benefits are real. However, many will not. Netscape's Virtual Office was one of the first in this game. NVO is a feature-rich, low cost way for small businesses to have a basic store up in minutes.