Comment by i2cmaster

3 years ago

Most people will tolerate the bugs until they absolutely cannot use whatever software they're running though.

Depends on whether it's common or not. If a smaller competitor has bugs, the default is something else, and folks will go yo the default and look askance at the ones sticking with the odd duck software. Source: Linux user since the 90s, LibreOffice/OpenOffice/StarOffice since early '00s.

When they reach that unusability limit, most people will call their IT department and have the offending buggy software reinstalled as a fix. IT won’t remove your buggy copy of Microsoft Word and Teams and replace it with WordPerfect and Slack.

  • But Word has competitors like GSuite so it cannot be completely complacent. People are making these buying decisions constantly.

    • It's had competitors forever. The lockin is from UI, file formats, compatibility generally (e.g. functions), scripting / existing infra around it, and its utter dominance in the market ("nobody got fired for buying Microsoft")

  • I should have said "people and organizations" because that's what I meant.

    The mechanism with organizations works like you said yes. They'll just develop processes to work around the bugs until it becomes completely impossible.