Excess inertia or excess momentum?
"Computer hardware continues to improve at a stunning pace, getting less expensive and faster almost by the month. Yet there is no comparable progress occurring in computer software. The basic categories of personal-computer software -- the operating system or such workhorse programs as word processors and spreadsheets -- haven't been rethought for nearly a generation, even as they have been stuffed full of new features ...
What passes for innovation is more often than not, like Windows 98, simply an incremental improvement of an existing product ... In the absence of real innovation, software companies intent on expanding sales are forced into the old ruse of adding marginal new features to exiting products ...
Billions of dollars and hours have been spent learning today's computer systems, making people wary of paying the switching costs associated with moving to a new technology. 'You rarely find a virgin user out there. You may have millions of documents created in one program; to get people to start using another one, you are going to have to convince them that it is a major improvement.
Lotus Development Corp., now an IBM unit, learned that lesson the hard way. For much of the 1980s, its 1-2-3 spreadsheet program was a corporate standard. Then, in 1992, Lotus brought out 'Improv,' an altogether new spreadsheet. Improv was widely praised as a breakthrough; reviewers were enthusiastic about how easy it was to gain new perspectives on numerical information. However, the product went nowhere, and Lotus stopped selling Improv less than two years after its debut."
Source: Lee Gomes, "Software Makers Pile On Features: As Innovation Slows, Bloatware Moves in," The Wall Street Journal Europe, June 27, 1999.