Your description of vendor lock-in is obviously solvable by developers making a competing UI and workflow similar to the most popular software, and enabling new features under another menu. That said, there is obviously minimal interest in doing so.
This is UI. UI is not vendor lock-in. Lock-in costs users money to break out of, not developers.
Oh yeah, when a school receives a hundreds of computers with Windows preinstalled, they obviously consider spending hundreds of man-hours on installing a different OS, but decide against it because Windows has quantifiably superiour UI. Because that’s exactly how it works.
Have you ever heard of SAP? Salesforce? UI quality and UX workflows have never been the deciding factor for choosing a piece of software in a corpo setting. It’s money and whose friend is pocketing it. That’s all that CFO make decisions on. Windows became a standard because Microsoft literally paid schools to buy computers with it, in exchange all schools had to do was let them conduct their indoctrination workshop, disguised as a “how to use a computer” course. But of course they exclusively talked about Windows.
That entire solution immediately falls apart when the paradigm is patented by the vendor, who immediately sues any competing software using UI elements even vaguely similar to theirs. This has been going on for decades, and the three things that usually happen are that the competitor either gets bought up, sued out of existence, or has to keep their UI different enough that there is little-to-no bleedover between the userbases (and usually starves to death from too little revenue).
Your description of vendor lock-in is obviously solvable by developers making a competing UI and workflow similar to the most popular software, and enabling new features under another menu. That said, there is obviously minimal interest in doing so.
This is UI. UI is not vendor lock-in. Lock-in costs users money to break out of, not developers.
Oh yeah, when a school receives a hundreds of computers with Windows preinstalled, they obviously consider spending hundreds of man-hours on installing a different OS, but decide against it because Windows has quantifiably superiour UI. Because that’s exactly how it works.
Have you ever heard of SAP? Salesforce? UI quality and UX workflows have never been the deciding factor for choosing a piece of software in a corpo setting. It’s money and whose friend is pocketing it. That’s all that CFO make decisions on. Windows became a standard because Microsoft literally paid schools to buy computers with it, in exchange all schools had to do was let them conduct their indoctrination workshop, disguised as a “how to use a computer” course. But of course they exclusively talked about Windows.
That entire solution immediately falls apart when the paradigm is patented by the vendor, who immediately sues any competing software using UI elements even vaguely similar to theirs. This has been going on for decades, and the three things that usually happen are that the competitor either gets bought up, sued out of existence, or has to keep their UI different enough that there is little-to-no bleedover between the userbases (and usually starves to death from too little revenue).