ESRI (The geospatial software company) and SAS (the commercial alternative to R) both got caught up reacting to their existing user bases instead of proactively

ESRI (The geospatial software company) and SAS (the commercial alternative to R) both got caught up reacting to their existing user bases instead of proactively watching the analytics world. Both companies have (or at least until recently had as my knowledge is circa-2008) very desktop-centric product lines. Their customers used their products as if they were fancy versions of Excel -- a perfectly valid use case, but not one suited to production analytics. Both companies first forays into production systems involved clunky wrappers around desktop components. I'm sure they will eventually put out first-rate headless production components, but there's probably a nice window available in which start-ups may innovate.