Customer Lock-in
Many companies design products to work only with their own parts, services, or related products. For example, accessories for a product made by one company will often be designed so that it is not compatible with the accessories for a similar product from another company. The result is that customers who purchase a product from one manufacturer may find themselves dependent on that company as long as they own the product. This situation is known as customer lock-in. The unfortunate result for customers is that they are locked in to continuing to buy from the original company because it can become costly to switch to a different brand for parts or accessories.
听力材料：
Professor: Okay. So a lot of companies in the camera industry actually do this. I am pretty into photography as a hobby. I love going out and taking pictures the old-fashioned way with a 35 mm camera. So a few years ago, I bought a pretty nice camera. It was a… Well, I don’t really want to name the company. We’ll just call it Brand A. As I became better at photography, I started purchasing different accessories for the camera. You know, like different lenses and filters, a camera case, etc for my Brand A camera. Anyway, one day I dropped and broke my zoom lens, which was pretty expensive. I was looking around for a new one to buy and saw an advertisement in the newspaper for a zoom lens I really liked. It was on sale at a discount and it was even much better than the one I had before, although it was made by a different company. Let’s call it Brand B. So I went down to the camera shop and asked the clerk if I could take a look at it. And that’s when I realized the Brand B lens wasn’t going to fit on my Brand A camera. I wouldn’t be able to attach it. So I ended up having to buy another Brand A lens even though I didn’t like it as much and it was more expensive. There wasn’t really anything else I could do.
Question：
