Test the buyer’s ability to replace a single component. Bundled pricing, default placement and mandatory dependence imply different barriers and different responses to an unbundled competitor.
How companies won with Product tying & default bundles
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. Revel Systems · 2015–26
Toast
Switching costs
What it did
Churn almost entirely from closures, no customer lost to a cloud POS (Dec 2015)
Revel Systems
Sold to Shift4 for $250M with about 18,000 locations, its product to be merged into SkyTab and its merchants moved onto Shift4 payments (2024)
Is the constraint technical, contractual, or a default? What would buyers replace if the products were offered separately?
Who names it
Author
What they call it / where it appears
Neumann
A Taxonomy of Moats — Product tying & default bundles
Note. The diagnostic and scenario are Strategy Canon’s analytical application. Test the firm’s benefit and exclusion mechanism separately; this category alone does not establish Power.