[_____s]

Most enterprise businesses win because of better sales and distribution, but your product ultimately has to support your sales. Salesforce had both (and other advantages). How does sales work in medium to large B2B? You'll get a RFP with a list of questions, you'll often get a list of features that company X wants. Naturally, as a company, you'd focus on building those features instead of optimising speed.

If the market values fast software, you'll see a lot more fast software. There _is_ a lot of unnecessarily slow software these days, so it _is_ starting to happen. Think Superhuman, Linear.app, etc. — an entire category of software based primarily on the idea of being fast, aimed at the power user. If these apps succeed, you'll see a lot more of them. If the market doesn't value fast software, most commercial software will be slow.

[bananaface]

I don't really agree with the premise. Sales by definition exploits the fact that the consumer can't differentiate between products on their own. That leaves a lot of leeway for broken software and misleading marketing.

I don't think companies choose to make bad software as a tradeoff. Salesforce had enough budget to build out those features and not be terrible. I think in general, when software is bad it's because the company wasn't able to make it good. And I think the distinction between those categories is important.