I think that quite a few large companies are currently entrenched in a way that is rather unfortunate for their customers: they are so hard to displace that it’s not longer important whether their product is good enough that the customers like it.

Microsoft: Windows is pretty bad lately (and is certainly not ahead of Linux when used as a desktop system in the way that it was, say, 20 years ago). But Microsoft barely cares whether anyone likes Windows because so many corporations are already thoroughly committed to Microsoft. If Microsoft were just starting out with its current product, it would be a hard sell. (Not just desktop — a lot of their serious enterprise stuff like AD is awful. But AD doesn’t need to be good any more — it just needs to be AD.)

Apple, too: their last few generations added very little benefit and a whole lot of bugs. Their hardware is no longer ahead of anyone else’s, and I don’t think their software really is either. But people have bought in to the ecosystem.

Android: Ditto, except there is barely even canonical hardware. Want apps but not iOS? You’re using Android.

Boeing: The 737 MAX seems to have been a commercial success more or less solely because quite a few buyers specifically wanted planes compatible with their existing 737 investments. Boeing doesn’t seem to be trying to make planes that buyers would choose if they were unconstrained.

The list goes on. Not that any of this is really new,