What's that quote again, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? CAD vendors might intentionally have designed "stickyness"

What's that quote again, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? CAD vendors might intentionally have designed "stickyness"[1] but banks and B2B transactions are pretty much standardized via EDI ANSI docs[2]. It's a legacy set of standardized protocols/documents that you have to deal with because DbC works badly, and corporate DbC works even worse when someone like SAP is influential in the decision process. SAP has done a lot of bad things[3] but they pretty much standardized how business is done in most industries, whether you're a plastics injection molder in China, dealing oil out of Dubai, or the trader in Zurich making his fortune figuring out how to get that crude from Dubai and refined into some plastic polymer pellets to that Chinese plastics vendor (who'll sell those 50 cent widgets to you in a few months). [1] We have the same thing in our industry, we just call it "vendor lock in". I sort of touched on how the "meta money" worse in fed contracts here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10807858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10807858). A CPA is basically a programmer maintaining legacy code (300 years of obscure tax code (they even call it the same thing)) feeding your input data (your quarter and/or years aggregate financial data) to produce output data (your 1040 or whatever). Edit: Havoc basically captured the whole "legacy" reasoning (a mentality of "they'll remember my potential failed project a lot more than they'll remember my potential re-implementation that will only slowly (but very substantially) accrue profits" is always in the back of your mind. There's a lot of politics when you reach the decision-making level and risk aversion is a necessary skill to adopt to keep yourself out of hot water. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X12_Document_List#Financial_Series_.28FIN.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X12_Document_List#Financial_Se... or variants there of. Even other ERP's FI & Controlling (or AP/AR) will have some sort of 'Connector" that will enable you to talk to SAP in some fashion. You'll just be paying Epicor, Netsuite, or Oracle a few hundred k for the modules. [3] Can't knock on it too much since I've profited directly from the convolution of SAP ECC 6, but I certainly I generated more value for the clients than I billed.