[llamaLord]

There's also the element of what I call "structural corruption". This isn't "money in brown paper bags" style corruption, as much as it is key stakeholders at customers having existing relationships with certain vendors, and having built their position at the company they work at based on being subject matter experts in that vendors tools.

Try breaking in to an established market as a new product, even if you have a distinctly better value proposition.

You will face a near impenetrable brick wall of critical customer stakeholders who are using the incumbent product and have very strong vested interests in NOT changing solution, no matter how much better your solution may be.

[hitekker]

Another word for the corruption you speak of is friendship.

The key stakeholders and their vendors are friends. They know each other, they get along, they get the product, and like you said, they've built their clout on the know-how of people and product. To choose another vendor, is to disrupt that friendship, and its ancillary benefits, e.g., a ring of trust and a status quo.

I wrote this comment because I've been on the inside. It doesn't feel like corruption when you're in it. It feels like you're getting work done with people you like, just ignoring silly process and distractions that make you think too hard and feel weird. Seeing things differently requires an outside power to intervene, or for the few key insiders to have an ethic that forces them to question their good time and each other.

Most groups of people, not just businesses, punish ethics in pursuit of collective self-interest. That is indeed corruption but it exists so systemically and so personally that I would first call it human nature.

[1] If you read this far, check out ChuckMcM's view on layoffs at Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384254

[lelanthran]

> The key stakeholders and their vendors are friends. They know each other, they get along, they get the product, and like you said, they've built their clout on the know-how of people and product.

It's not even a friendship in many cases: This is how CEOs fail upwards, after all. It's better to take on a CEO/vendor with a known incompetence level than take a risk on an unknown.

Look at it from this point of view: you're the customer, you have an existing supplier, who frequently fucks up. Due to the frequency, you already have controls in place to mitigate the fuck ups. Do you really want to try someone new with different fuckups that will get past your existing controls?

[llamaLord]

To be clear, I 100% agree. That's why I refer to it as "structural". No individual or even group of individuals is actively doing anything corrupt, but the overall structure creates an environment where self-interested individuals create an outcome that is VERY difficult to distinguish vs the outcome you would get from more obtuse corruption.

It's more akin to the Chinese concept of Guangxi (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi).

The problem is that where Guangxi ends and corruption begins is a VERY murky question with no clear way of finding an answer.

[whatshisface]

Guess how it works in third world governments!

[vasco]

More often than not the whippersnappers that do sales and think they have a better product we should replace, 1) don't actually have a better product and 2) assume there's no cost to migrate and re-train.

And even if your thing is 5% better at some core functionality, if it misses important integrations or security controls and will take a year to replace, it makes no sense to switch.

[backwardation_b]

This may be relevant to a space with a large(r) amount of mature competitors, but I am not sure it exists in smaller (less mature) markets to the extent it impacts your ability to sell.

You need a considerable amount of internal political power to push away a new “competitor”, which generally requires time (maturity).

This is not to say it does not happen, but I think the markets where this is a key element of friction in selling possess enough capital to win-over entrenched “rent-seekers” if needed.

[verve_rat]

This is all true, but it misses one nuance, your "competitors" might not be other products/services. In an untried space they are at likely as not to be manual processes emailing spreadsheets around.

[doctor_eval]

Agree. I used to say that my biggest competitors were my own customers.