> Customers...never wanted to update, due to risk of changes [...] We’d get escalations on things that were fixed years ago [...] as upstart competitors stole [our] market share.
This is so weird to me, though. Your customers had two choices:
1. Stay with your software and upgrade to the latest version, where the bugs they were hitting were fixed, and risk some amount of retraining due to UI/UX changes.
2. Switch to a completely new, different product, which guarantees retraining (possibly a lot more), and probably would contain the same or different bugs they were fighting with when using your software.
And... they went with #2?? I get that people think the grass is always greener on the other side, but there's a reason why we have that saying!
I suspect they were thrilled at the prospect of a better made product (not encumbered by historical baggage) that cost less, had a lower friction sales process, made by a company actively trying to win them over.
You are assuming the changes would all be positive, minus some UI hassle. I have seen plenty of products where vital workflows were scrapped entirely or made significantly more clunky.
Modern software is quicksand. Maybe an update improves things, but users have all experienced working software made worse.
Yup. Powerful features are removed to "streamline experience". Sometimes in bulk, because product migrated from e.g. bespoke native app to multiplatform webshit in an embedded browser, which automatically halved the performance and removed most ergonomics.
And then new features are released as MVPs - meaning, they do the absolute minimum to check the box (almost a literal box: close the feature ticket internally), and inefficiently so. Whether it'll be iterated on afterwards, depends. Pretty unlikely in the immediate term. They need to "collect usage data to know what to do" first, which means it gets deprioritized relative to moar features.
But that's fine for me. As long as copy-paste works, I can make do with other software, perhaps competing software, or worst case, have Claude find and use some powerful-but-janky OSS CLI tool to do the stuff for me.
I'm less angry at it than I used to. Mostly because I don't have time to be annoyed anymore, but it's true that I've learned to like updates from few companies. That's because after years - years - I've noticed things gradually improving on average. True of Android & Samsung OneUI, except when it's not. True of UniFi stuff. If I see some new feature behaving badly, I now mostly trust they'll eventually fix it. It'll take a year or three, they'll overhaul it entirely twice, and I may need to buy a new phone to get it, but it will happen one day. But most software doesn't even clear that bar.
Yes, they go with #2 because they are really p***.
As anecdote of one, I was once part of a project to port a .NET Framework to Java, because the customer was really annoyed with the rewrite, as the application relied heavily on the .NET Features that never made the cut to modern .NET.
Another two .NET heavy weights in .NET CMS space, Sitecore and Optimizely, nowadays rely on JS/TS frameworks for their extensibility SDKs on the SaaS products for headless deployment, only the classical (older) PaaS still support .NET as extension language.
This is so weird to me, though. Your customers had two choices:
1. Stay with your software and upgrade to the latest version, where the bugs they were hitting were fixed, and risk some amount of retraining due to UI/UX changes.
2. Switch to a completely new, different product, which guarantees retraining (possibly a lot more), and probably would contain the same or different bugs they were fighting with when using your software.
And... they went with #2?? I get that people think the grass is always greener on the other side, but there's a reason why we have that saying!