Accumulation lock-in

Retention produced by the growing cost of extracting accumulated records rather than by continued value. The customer’s history is the hostage, the cost of departure rises with every month of use, and the relationship survives on the arithmetic of leaving rather than on anything either party wanted. Named as strategy in Shapiro and Varian’s account of installed-base value as aggregate switching cost, and treated as a market failure by the portability and cloud-switching provisions that followed.