I had a conversation the other day on my commute about rough (or failed) SAP migrations/implementations and it was clear that the buyers and other supply chain folks fallback to emailing excel spreadsheets when things hit the fan. This ubiquity of their products and it being the lowest common denominator means they will never go out of business. Like it or not Microsoft products are the glue that holds the business world together.
Like any commercial vendor optimized around selling software licenses. A commercial vendor optimized around selling software-backed services and complete solutions has different incentives, since they end up eating the costs of churn. Unsurprisingly, lots of companies that do the latter are built around (and often sponsor) open source software.
Perhaps. Service providers ensure the services they provide are often needed to get the job done in a timely manner. More subtle, but effective. All companies have to make money.
Sure, and that can be problematic -- see Intuit's intensive lobbying to keep tax filing onerous to protect TurboTax's niche -- but that's a different specific issue than promoting software churn (well, except in Intuit's specific case, where while they demonstrate the problem that can exist with solution providers, they are also a licensed-software provider that can also be seen as promoting software churn at the same time.)
