This is a puzzling attitude to me. Every time we technologists see a crappy proprietary solution being used for a problem, the first exclamation is, "why not use <commodity solution X>? That's so dumb, they spent $10k on that tool when they could have spent $100 on X!"

There must be a middle ground here- the paradox is that Google, Apple, etc have this ability to generate user friendly software and hardware at scale. But they aren't considered "battle proven". The expensive proprietary systems that are used instead tend to be hard to use and brittle, so what's the middle ground?