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Very true. And vice versa is actually a pretty neat idea. Youngme Moon who I mention in the article has a book called Different which I highly recommend. She's got a bit in there about differentiating yourself by making it insanely easy for people to leave your service. Most folks make it hard to even find a cancel link (I know I've been guilty of this), let alone make it super easy to move their data out into a competitor.

It's on my priority list actually for some future projects to make it super easy to quit and migrate data out of my stuff to a competitor.

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She's got a bit in there about differentiating yourself by making it insanely easy for people to leave your service.

Are there any examples of this leading to success?

Zappos is a great example of doing this kind of thing. From anecdotes, it sounds like if you call Zappos to order something that they don't have in stock, they'll help you find a competitor that has it. There's some insurance companies that do this too. They'll help get you quotes from competitors. Amazon does this a bit too with their outbound advertising links. (Of course for Amazon there's still a direct monetary incentive)

Sometimes it's a great hook to help potential customers feel more comfortable doing business by giving them a good reason to trust you. You're doing what's right for them as a customer, not necessarily what's right for you as a business.

Gmail seems like a decent example. Unlike a lot of other webmail providers, they made it easy to access your e-mail with a standard e-mail client and thereby download your full archives. With Google Apps, you can use Gmail on your own domain and switch away whenever you want by just re-pointing your MX record. I use Gmail on my own domain for my main e-mail, and could switch away in an instant if I wanted to.

Ah yeah, that's a great example. In fact, if I remember right, Gmail has always been a lot more friendly with getting mail out of gmail than services like hotmail and yahoo mail have (doesn't Yahoo still delete inactive account email?). I think by now hotmail and yahoo have tried to follow suit, but I think that was another reason people gravitated toward gmail (though minor compared to space and great web ui). It just seemed like if it sucked, no harm. I still have all my mail.

Pretty sure it was there from the start, yes. People remember how revolutionary it was for the storage and UI, but making client access available for free was just as big of a deal at the time. I'd never use a service that didn't provide that, so it certainly was a big factor in getting me to use Gmail, and I imagine the same is true for a lot of others. Certainly seems to have worked out for them.