When I worked IT, our honeywell rep used to swing by at random and bring the entire building doughnuts. And I'm not talking gas station doughnuts, I'm talking doughnuts from the best bakery in the state (which happened to be local). Perhaps, not surprisingly we used a lot of honeywell stuff. It isn't hard to bribe IT guys.
Honestly, their comercial ones are getting that way too. Like who the hell needs a touchscreen on an industrial thermal printer; thats just one more thing to easily break in an industrial environment. And god forbid you want a replacement touch screen because a new one is half the cost of a new printer.
it's because implementing an existing touch screen module and then telling a bunch of code monkeys in a 3rd world country to write a barely functional UI for it is actively cheaper than engineering, sourcing, assembling and testing keypads with physical buttons or even a membrane keyboard these days
using a touch screen also means they can put the same mass produced PCB into 40 different products instead of needing a custom button pattern for each. just tell the code monkeys to update the UI. there's a lot of economic arguments for the use of touch screens, but it sure doesn't make the field worker's lives any easier.
Took way too long for me to remember that they did more than make thermostats when reading your comment.
Like, I know they do, but I pass my Honeywell thermostat multiple times daily so my brain immediately got confused as to why an IT team needed to regularly buy thermostats to the point a salesman was involved.