No need for the condescension; I didn't imagine myself to be building some ivory citadel - I was working to make sure that changes required from a business perspective could be quickly and cleanly integrated without impacting the stability of the software.

The customers do eventually go. These companies will slowly fail, and they slowly fail because they specialized in customer retention (or more like trapping) either through legal (ie: lobbying, monopolizing, etc..) or illegal (dark shady patterns)

> The customers do eventually go. These companies will slowly fail, and they slowly fail because they specialized in customer retention

Maybe this is true in the general case, but there are so many exceptions to this that I feel it is not true enough.

Customers don't care about about using the best tool, they only care if it is good enough, and a computer/application/software that crashes once a day is actually good enough for most desktop workflows.

An OS that abuses the user might still be good enough that better alternatives cannot get a foothold. Same is true for web applications, enterprise systems, games, etc.

It's only when you get into the embedded space that you face the "quality or GTFO", because people have lower tolerance for malfunctioning appliances than they do for malfunctioning computer systems.