Regarding “the company made the new tech incompatible with the new tech to force people to buy the new”, I’ll invoke Hanlon’s razor.

I worked for a software company that was bought out by a microscope company, because they realized making a new software from scratch for each microscope was very expensive.

They did not have the know-how to reuse the software.

And yes. They were that bad at software, when they bought us out, colleagues of mine audited the software they were writing for their newest microscope, and it was so bad they threw out the whole thing to start from scratch, with proper software engineering practices.

Also, there is an open source toolkit that is pretty good at reading microscope data called VTK (IIRC it’s developed partly by Zeiss, one of the two main microscope manufacturers).