The service improved customers' rock yields, reducing downstream processing costs—and making customers dependent on the company.
Companies that value stability, obedient customers, dependent suppliers, and sleepy competitors are inviting inertia and, ultimately, failure.
A similar mischievousness seems to have explained the government's response when an official accused Microsoft of behaving like a drug dealer in handing out free software to make customers dependent on its products.
To cope, Mr. Goldin persuaded lenders to maintain his credit lines while he cut costs, sharply reduced the bad debt on his books and switched his target from customers dependent on the housing industry to businesses that do well in recessions, like fast-food restaurants.
"I think it's a good development that the minister of culture of Brazil is looking after the interests of a Brazilian artist," he says, "who happens to be himself". A similar mischievousness seems to have explained the government's response when an official accused Microsoft of behaving like a drug dealer in handing out free software to make customers dependent on its products.
For example, commercial banks make financial loan decisions and issue credit cards to customers dependent on corporate (or individual) credit ratings or credit scores.
Much like the women in science campaign, making customers dependent on its products while acting to deserve a pat on the back is what beauty care companies really care about.
Donyella S. Wright, owner of Hair Scene by Donyella, a beauty parlor, said some of her customers are dependent on curbside parking.
Apple reportedly doesn't make a lot of money on the transactions... just $0.15 per every $100 in transactions... but the service does make its customers more dependent on their phones.
In rural areas, grocers dispatched so-called huckster wagons to the country to sell canned goods and prepared foods, and customers were dependent on when these wagons arrived and what they carried.
The vendor lock-in problem in cloud computing is the situation where customers are dependent (i.e. locked-in) on a single cloud provider technology implementation and cannot easily move in the future to a different vendor without substantial costs, legal constraints, or technical incompatibilities [23].
