The network effect of Jira is obviously at the department level; dept. head A mandates Jira. User B gets moved to new dept. C, we need some sort of project management tool - hey B what did you use when you were working for A, oh A likes using Jira, I didn't like it much but it's ok I guess.

Ok folks, let's use Jira!

Dept. Head A moves to Dept. D, hey everyone we are going to start using Jira.

Dept D. is being merged with Dept. E, Dept and new Dept. Head J is joining. E is using some open source Kanban solution based on CouchDB, hmm, let's go to Jira - other departments are also using it and then we can get rid of the CouchDB thing!

In point of fact where network effects of Jira is concerned, I have put some effort into learning JQL and setting up my own dashboards, so when you give me one of the competitors I get grouchy. I prefer Jira or Trello - also owned by Atlassian iirc?

another network effect of Jira is that it's usually set up using AD, so once it's installed and configured, anyone in that org can go and look around without having to create an account.

Jira can have a network effect.

ISO (the standards body) has started using it, I'm sure in part because large companies who contribute to standards were already using it. The committee that I am a member of switched from Bugzilla to it.

JIRA's network effect is the amount of plugins and third party integrations that work with JIRA.

The author points at monday.com: I used it a few years ago and it only has basic and useless integrations out of the box, even for a service like Gitlab. You either develop what you need youreslf of try to so something with Zapier.

What network effects does MSWord have?

Everyone else is using it to write documents, email around drafts, collaboratively edit via OneDrive; sure you can use an alternative, but nobody will want to see a format but .docx, so your alternative is almost guaranteed to be worse than or equivalent to Word. If your alternative stuffs up the document's formatting you become seen as a pain in the neck. So it's just easier to use Word.

Every contract I've received or sent for red-lining uses Word and change tracking. I'm sure exceptions exist, but every lawyer I've dealt with uses Word as the defacto standard for contract negotiations.

You couldn't open a MSWord file without MSWord.