Glossary / Switching cost

Switching cost

What a customer must give up to move to a competitor. Every shipped update quietly raises it and deepens loyalty.

Introduced in Chapter 22 — Product Valhalla of Tangibles.

Related terms

• Churn — The fraction of customers lost each cycle.
• Sunk cost — Money already spent that cannot be recovered.
• Systems engineering — The traditional discipline of mastering physical constraints and technical trade-offs to make hardware work — strong on the "how," historically distant from the customer's "why."
• Sensor fusion — Combining inputs from multiple sensors — motion, biometric, vision — into a richer signal than any one sensor provides; the highest level of the interface stack.