Productivity tools are like cuisine, there will always be many choices and users will keep switching as tastes change to stay engaged.
Consider the cascade of specialized productivity apps (not suites) over the years, like Evernote, Wunderlist, Any.do, Todoist, Trello, Clubhouse, Basecamp, and the list goes on. Many of these are stable businesses, but they all claim a small piece of a large pie (and one could argue, were not great VC investments from a multiples perspective). The fundamental flaw of these technologies is that they thrive with personalization for each customer, and die by trying to personalize for every customer. To complicate matters, in a world where customers retain out of anxiety around “switching costs” (the burden of adopting a new tool), there are actually switching benefits when it comes to productivity tools.
Every few years, when your system gets clogged with old stuff (or if you have a new leader in your team, you may have the desire to switch things up. Like a dose of spring cleaning, switching tools boosts your productivity. In doing so, you make the tool super relevant to your current needs once again.
…Makes me wonder if the path to truly win the modern “productivity app” category is launching an underlying set of APIs for every aspect of project management + personal productivity with a wide and evolving set of products and interfaces (native ones and third-party creations) that users can switch between (and, in the process, endure a light “cleansing” process)?