For an example of how this plays out, look at the proliferation of desktop GUIs in the late 80s and into the 90s. Everybody was throwing in gratuitous differences in the hopes of making their look and feel "different enough" to avoid a lawsuit. So we ended up with a mess: swapping the location of "OK" and "Cancel" buttons, every platform's scroll bars behaved differently, "Trash" vs "Recycle", and so on. There was some well-intentioned experimentation to see if the status quo could be improved, but those good ideas couldn't spread and become universal.