That's a dream. The googles and such just buy them out and shut them down. There is always a bigger fish that spends more money preserving the status quo than making a product.

I would love to see exactly how many people dropped Adobe after the latest drama, I would bet it would look exactly like the Netflix micro dip after shutting down password sharing.

That's why a lot of us are here after all.

I think it's equally true for product companies. Do you know how hard it is to get a company to prioritize bug fixing over feature work? Shy of a user revolt, or a friend of the CEO reporting an issue, bugs are almost always second priority or lower.

No idea what you are talking about. Product companies are exactly what I am referring to. Some director signs off on the purchase, probably has never even seen the software. But he has seen the sales pitch. That is what the C suite of small companies are for, mingling with the decision makers.

No.. the decision maker on the purchase is the user in that case. For software, the decision maker is almost always someone who won't use it. Like ticket tracking software. The people filing the tickets, and the people responding are not the people who decided which ticket tracking software to buy.

Sonos has pissed me off. After the latest update, the app cannot locate the speakers in any of my rooms. The TV speakers still work with a signal from the TV, but the speakers in all other rooms basically cannot be used.

I've factory reset them, set them up in the app, and as soon as that is done, they disappear from the app again.

They worked fine for years, then this bullshit. I'm researching a home theater setup that doesn't use Sonos and am planning on selling it all once I've found replacements.

It feels like I don't own the very expensive hardware that I have bought. I guess since they are software controlled, I really dont.

Software just has to be good enough that people put up with it. Once you get users on the system, you make it difficult to move your data out which acts as a lock in mechanism. The company that can make a minimally usable product that people are willing to put up with will typically beat one making a really good product that takes longer to get to market.

When the buyer isn't the user (which is most of the time), no there isn't. Competitors try to win with great sounding features and other marketing BS because that is all the director will see. The users are then left with the product that has all the bells and whistles, but is terrible at doing what actually needs to be done. And the competition is the same, so they don't really have much choice. Bell's and whistles are cheaper than making it work well.

I support accounting professionals using one of perhaps four or five highly complex pieces of software that handles individual, corp, trust, and other misc tax forms

The churn rate is very low YoY, because it’s what they know. They have the freedom to move their data, and we will help them to the extent possible, but at most they’ll get a subset of client data and lose the ability to query agai t prior year datasets, etc.

They’re not locked in, but between 10/15 and, say, 2/15 is a damn short time to implement and learn a new piece of software with that level of complexity.

Interestingly, I’ve never seen a long-standing calculation bug in the program. The overwhelming majority of support is d/t user error or data entry error. From that standpoint, there is of course a financial incentive for it to work well - arithmetic errors would be unacceptable - but in terms of UI/UX, no one cares and if anything were improved folks would just whine about the change anyway - even if it made their life easier

Not a CPA/not your CPA, just a software guy who got lucky enough to be in the right time/place when I decided I didn’t have the energy for the startup world anymore.

Subscribers? 90 some odd % of SaaS is sold to businesses, not individuals.

Quality is meaningless in SaaS. Only features matter.