In the DAW space, ProTools continuing-but-diminishing semi-dominance (at least at a professional level) is rooted in hardware rather than software. When they started, you could do not realtime audio on the CPU, so you got a DSP box with the software. The sort of hardware requirement was invaluable to Digidesign in establishing and locking in their early users, and it really didn't go away until sometimes in the mid-2000s when everybody started noticing that you really could do a remarkably large amount of processing on the CPU itself.
So in this world at least, the longevity of the first mover has more to do with actual and imagined barriers to entry rather than anything especially good about the software itself (and indeed, many of its users used to complain endlessly about the software).
So in this world at least, the longevity of the first mover has more to do with actual and imagined barriers to entry rather than anything especially good about the software itself (and indeed, many of its users used to complain endlessly about the software).