Yes, Either you go the Salesforce route and make your software configurable to support any companies processes and people, or you go the Expensify route and make your software so simple to understand and so useful that the "process people" have no choice but to accept it, and everyone else likes it.

Trying to do something in the middle that simplifies processes across groups will result in a veto from the process people. They are very well aware that their job is tied to making processes important and following those processes. They can't code, or even manage things well. But they can follow processes and advocate for how important all of their processes are within the org.

Salesforce is successful because it tells a story around how easy it it is to just get started. Startup cost in a frequently underrated datapoint in tool selection.

Then there reaches a point where extracting the data and moving it to some other system becomes such an implacable task that it is cheaper to just keep paying the renewal POs.

Is it really hard to extract data? That would appear to be an unnecessary friction and not in the interest of any serious vendor.

I imagine the lockin is all the custom code you wrote for the platform. The data is portable, even the schema can be reproduced in a fairly straightforward way. But all your bespoke automation code is not portable.

It shouldn't be, but there's always been very healthy industry niches around pulling data from one system and putting it into another one. Nothing ever lines up exactly, and there's always some idiosyncratic remapping or futzing that has to be done manually or with some one-off custom code, so it remains an expensive contract business.

The friction is in salesforce's favor.

Many people might have forgotten or not know that when Salesforce started out, they were the lean software [1] that was so much better than the competition. I was using ChangePoint — it sometimes took a few minutes to login (don't ask why, I don't know; But I suppose it's for the same reasons that Jira is horribly slow for some people). The UI was clunky and it was horribly slow.

Salesforce was a breath of fresh air.

PS: I think they were also one of the few cloud-based (rather than on-premise) enterprise offerings in the earlier days which helped got them some customers.

[1] relatively any way.

I thought it was Cloud that fueled the growth than only a few customers.

I think there is a bit of snobbery about those that "use Salesforce" vs the underclasses who don't.

Of course, once you start using it and wire in all of the integations to everything else in your company, it would be so difficult to transfer to another product so it is as sticky as **. Starts getting a lot more expensive too!

the internet is a glorified spreadsheet.