Comment by mananaysiempre

Recent years have shown this to be the wrong prediction strategy. The reason seems to be an incentive imbalance where there are quite a few reasons for companies to lie (including their own CLAs) and not a lot of repercussions for doing so (everybody competes on lock-in, not on product). Of course, the word-of-mouth approach is also exploitable by dishonest actors, but thus far there doesn’t look to be a lot of exploitation going on, likely because there’s little reason to bother (once again, lock-in is king).