The interests of platform vendors and developers are not aligned.
Developers want their skills to be portable, in order to maximize the market for their labor. Platform vendors want you to stick with their offerings in order to maximize the value of the platform.
Even so, vendors can choose how high to dial up the pain they inflict on developers who dare to wander. Trying to develop websites that worked across multiple browsers a decade ago was incredibly painful because of Microsoft dragging its feet on standards compliance for IE. It was so bad that many developers from that era will bear a grudge towards Microsoft for the rest of their lives.
I always laugh bitterly when I hear from a vendor about how much they care about developers. If you really cared about developers you wouldn't make our lives so damn difficult. A huge chunk of my life has been lost to switching costs.
Probably the best remedy is to use developer-governed FOSS platforms whenever possible. The perverse incentives towards lockin don't go away entirely, but they are much less.
Developers want their skills to be portable, in order to maximize the market for their labor. Platform vendors want you to stick with their offerings in order to maximize the value of the platform.
Even so, vendors can choose how high to dial up the pain they inflict on developers who dare to wander. Trying to develop websites that worked across multiple browsers a decade ago was incredibly painful because of Microsoft dragging its feet on standards compliance for IE. It was so bad that many developers from that era will bear a grudge towards Microsoft for the rest of their lives.
I always laugh bitterly when I hear from a vendor about how much they care about developers. If you really cared about developers you wouldn't make our lives so damn difficult. A huge chunk of my life has been lost to switching costs.
Probably the best remedy is to use developer-governed FOSS platforms whenever possible. The perverse incentives towards lockin don't go away entirely, but they are much less.