[fivre]

> Customers actually like stable, responsive, and efficient tools, who would have thought?

_Existing_ customers like these things (and they aren't wrong for liking these things).

New business comes from the potential customers who weren't enticed by the existing feature set, robust or otherwise. You bring them in by adding new features. The retain/new business priority is often heavily weighted in favor of the latter.

Retaining existing customers stuck with a crappy product ain't that hard between sunk cost/lock-in effects and the evergreen insulation of people with purchasing authority from the day-to-day pain inflicted by their purchasing decisions. A couple fancy steak dinners for middle management effectively papers over the cost of driving a department of ops engineers to cirrhosis several times over.

[sirwhinesalot]

You're absolutely right, and it makes me sad :(