Products optimised for one isolated market evolve past what any other market will accept, and cannot be exported.
Named for Japanese mobile phones, which by the mid-2000s carried contactless payment, digital television and mobile email years ahead of foreign handsets and sold almost nowhere else. The isolation that produced the advance produced the incompatibility, and the advance is what made the incompatibility invisible from inside.
In practice
- A bank builds a payments system to a national standard nobody else uses, and can neither export it nor buy a replacement.
- A firm whose internal tooling is the best in its industry finds that no engineer outside the building can use it.