I won't pretend to know what the author was thinking, but one obvious answer is that the central authority approach makes data lock-in a whole lot easier.
Is there actually evidence for increasing data lock-in though? It seems to me that we’re all using compatible and often openly standardized formats for the files we create/consume on our local machines slightly more often than in the past, or else are storing data in web apps, where it’s accessible from any platform with a browser.
