I doubt there's a single reason for the staying power of proprietary software, that explains all of the examples. But here are some of my thoughts:
1. Really sweating the details of the UI, and managing the vast number of edge cases that users are uncannily able to discover, takes an army of programmers doing work that they only enjoy well enough to do it for a lot of money.
2. Not knowing what the software is used for gives the incumbent an advantage. They don't need to know -- just keep making the same thing, which is mainly what the user wants. Until they try to design Version 2, god help them. Anybody else is stuck replicating all of the incumbent's features. Programming tools don't have this problem because users can implement their own features.
3. The economics have to make sense. I don't pay for my annual subscription to <specialized technical software>, and it's chump change for my employer. A workshop that tries to cheap out on CAD will lose their designers.
4. A lot of software flies below the radar. I've never seen any of my employer's software products mentioned on HN, yet we're quite a big company.
5. Software tied to other stuff, such as hardware, databases (and data), etc. That stuff is effectively a dongle.
1. Really sweating the details of the UI, and managing the vast number of edge cases that users are uncannily able to discover, takes an army of programmers doing work that they only enjoy well enough to do it for a lot of money.
2. Not knowing what the software is used for gives the incumbent an advantage. They don't need to know -- just keep making the same thing, which is mainly what the user wants. Until they try to design Version 2, god help them. Anybody else is stuck replicating all of the incumbent's features. Programming tools don't have this problem because users can implement their own features.
3. The economics have to make sense. I don't pay for my annual subscription to <specialized technical software>, and it's chump change for my employer. A workshop that tries to cheap out on CAD will lose their designers.
4. A lot of software flies below the radar. I've never seen any of my employer's software products mentioned on HN, yet we're quite a big company.
5. Software tied to other stuff, such as hardware, databases (and data), etc. That stuff is effectively a dongle.