Oracle

In the nineteen eighties, Larry Ellison built Oracle databases and sold them to banks and insurance companies. Every application these corporations ran sat on top of the Oracle database. Data, transactions, everything lived inside Oracle. Migrating to a competitor would take years and risk breaking every system. Oracle became infrastructure, not software or commodity. Oracle charged annual license fees. The fees were not cheap. But enterprise customers could not leave. Migration meant rebuilding years of work. It meant months of downtime. It meant risking losing customer data. The switching cost exceeded the license fee by orders of magnitude. Oracle had built a trap where leaving cost more than staying and paying.