As someone who currently makes a product geared towards improving the user experience of enterprise software, I think much of what you say is true. Some things

As someone who currently makes a product geared towards improving the user experience of enterprise software, I think much of what you say is true. Some things I've learned from my own experience: Rather than try to get people to change anything (like have them use a different product altogether) I built my product to integrate deeply with Salesforce.com (a product with a large install base). I tried to focus on specific shortcomings of Salesforce and fix those because a huge investment has already been sunk in their current system and the whole thing is not going to change. Rather than focus first on design (which certainly factors in--it's a new user interface for Salesforce) I focused on improving the speed of specific tasks and emphasize time savings and increased user adoption. It is a lot easier to get something sold and closed at a company with 50-100 users than it is 500-1000. I have gotten feedback that I should have made things even more like Excel or ACT (ugh), because it's what people are used to. IE, many people don't want a new interface, they want an old one. It has been near impossible to sell a "one size fits all" solution for this, so I have gone the route of customizing heavily in exchange for much higher prices--a hybrid product/consulting approach. Simple sounds like a good idea, but every company has different processes and methods, and they want those integrated. (Probably why Salesforce itself had to focus on customization and a developer eco-system so much over the last 5 years). Even with all this, what I thought would be a "slam dunk" has proven to be really really hard to sell. However, I have massively improved my sales conversions by ditching the self serve approach and embracing the hybrid product/consulting model.