No-Code and the IKEA Effect: Software lock-in evolved to make us never churn

I&#x27;ve come to the conclusion that code is temporary, and is meant to be discarded after a while. Hardware change, requirements change, people change. The things that are permanent are data and methods.<p>That&#x27;s why I think as long as you have documented and defined your methods (i.e. business logic) well, and your data is portable, you shouldn&#x27;t worry much about vendor lock-in in the long run.

I don&#x27;t use Ikea furniture because I have to assemble it. It&#x27;s just, cheap, reasonably good, easy to find and get. The idea of having to buy a non-Ikea desk scares me because I have no idea where to buy it (I&#x27;d have to spend time googling, analyzing and coping with uncertainty), I believe it&#x27;s going to be expensive (which also implies I&#x27;ll spend the rest of my life worrying about damaging its surface) and heavy. With Ikea I just go there and get whatever I need (+ an awesome Swedish dinner and best coffee ever).

&gt; We may have complained for decades when software locked us in; now, we’re happy to stay.<p>Being willing to trade-off higher costs and less control in order to use new technology is commonplace in consumer tech. Nobody has ever been &quot;happy&quot; about this vendor lock-in, why would no-code be any different?<p>The current proprietary tools are valuable but they don&#x27;t allow users to export their creations between vendors offering the same functionality - that means they are more locked-in then ever. Users have the added emotional element of having to abandon their creation and accept the sunk-cost if they want to switch. I&#x27;m quite sure that nobody is happy about that fact.

Great piece, I think human satisfaction should be the most important metric when measuring products. The article implies somewhat it’s not. Also I think product which engages you and make you feel you learned something adds value, but only if you overcome the challenges (IKEA, Emacs)