This is not true though. It really depends on the company and their philosophy, whether they are publicly traded or what their executive team is like.

Good companies know how to invest into their products and make them world class. In my previous job, we used a wind turbine simulation package developed by 25 engineers and it was so great - they really cared and fixed things. It was $50k/seat/annual license but we were almost like 2 different teams under the same company.

"You scratch my back, I scratch yours".

There are also a lot of companies that have lock-ins and generally awful attitude towards their own products. This also exists in the open source world - there is a lot of awful open source code out there.

> Commercial software has an incentive to pump out new features to get more customers.

Not if it's SaaS.

Vendors of rented software have no economic incentive to develop new features, or even fix bugs, because they get subscription fees without needing to do any work.

There is still competition to consider though. If a SaaS product has competitors that are more reliable, or more feature rich, they should win & retain more customers over time.

Data lock-in, due to proprietary file formats, makes switching software extremely difficult, especially for companies that interchange data with outside entities.

For instance, companies that do design and/or A/V work have no real alternatives to paying Adobe monthly--regardless of how little work Adobe puts into Creative Suite--because it's an industry standard and there are no alternatives that offer friction-free interoperability.

They still have to attract new customers, and investors really want to see growth not just a stable number of subscribers.