I was in b2b software sales until recently. I've been on the other side of the table when the buyer will be an end user, or when they have end users they're placing trust in and actually listening to.
Imo the issue is more just that ease of use is a hard sell. Buyers, including end users, want features. Lots of them. They want to be able to do everything they could ever potentially think to do within your software, doesn't matter if some of those tasks are once a month/year items for which perfectly good solutions already exist and for which there's no real gain from having it within this solution. It's what they ask about, what they want to talk about, what they test for, what I get feedback on from them when I win/lose the sale.
They might want ease of use in 6 months when they're actually using the thing and not give two hoots about most of the things they were certain were necessary earlier, but that's irrelevant. They didn't want it when it mattered. Now they're locked in. In terms of contract but also in terms of what their processes are designed for, what their staff are trained to use, what their other tools integrate with; and there's no guarantee or even reason to believe that an alternative wont be just as bad.
So there's tons of pressure on b2b software providers to do a lot of things but very little to do any of it well.
This is exactly it. You don’t lose an RFP if your product sucks. You lose an RFP if you say that it doesn’t match one of the 700 outrageous requirements
That and also distribution. One of the hardest part of breaking into enterprise is selling, and once big companies have a sales motion in place and locked-in customers (both in data on their platform and internal processes), penetrating crappier products into the market is increasingly easier so the quality bar goes down to some extent.
Imo the issue is more just that ease of use is a hard sell. Buyers, including end users, want features. Lots of them. They want to be able to do everything they could ever potentially think to do within your software, doesn't matter if some of those tasks are once a month/year items for which perfectly good solutions already exist and for which there's no real gain from having it within this solution. It's what they ask about, what they want to talk about, what they test for, what I get feedback on from them when I win/lose the sale.
They might want ease of use in 6 months when they're actually using the thing and not give two hoots about most of the things they were certain were necessary earlier, but that's irrelevant. They didn't want it when it mattered. Now they're locked in. In terms of contract but also in terms of what their processes are designed for, what their staff are trained to use, what their other tools integrate with; and there's no guarantee or even reason to believe that an alternative wont be just as bad.
So there's tons of pressure on b2b software providers to do a lot of things but very little to do any of it well.