"Relying on technology alone to drive the evolution of an IS presents two dangers that we refer to as the “fashion victim syndrome” and the “vendor trapping syndrome”.
Technological fashion victims trust in technology so blindly that they tend to systematically own the latest gadgets, thinking their life will change forever and for the better. Similar behavior could be observed from some tech-gurus in many IT departments during this first period. This undoubtedly fueled the impression, an often justified one, that IS s are like black holes, swallowing more and more resources while not producing much more than the previous versions and sometimes even less. As is now apparent to any observant CIO, choosing the latest technologies implies risks that often outweigh the benefits of the hypothetical improvements claimed by the latest hype. This matter of fact led a prominent IT thinker [CAR 03] to make the provocative suggestion that wisdom in this field systematically belong to technology followers rather than to the leaders.
Vendor trapping, on the other hand, is the situation in which the vendor leverages the strong software-hardware coupling to discourage customers from trying competitor's products. The most extreme form of trapping was simply locking: the software could not even run on alternative hardware.
With multi-platform languages like Java having been around for nearly 15 years now, cost-free hardware-agnostic system software like Linux for nearly 20 years, and the openness of IT systems promoted to a quasi-religion, this could sound almost like prehistory. But caution is still needed because the “trapping devil” is certainly not dead yet. Indeed, it has been rather active lately, tempting some of the major IT actors."
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