It seems clear that every single company that makes money off of software is or will soon be in a race to the bottom on software quality

A lot of younger people who are being conditioned to accept this stuff just weren’t around to experience how unstable and unreliable the vast majority of PC software was in the 1990s, and a lot of more senior-level people must have willfully forgotten. I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately. The difference was that in the 90s, the major PC companies could port their enterprise-grade OSes with proper memory protection down to the consumer level, as hardware advanced and running a more complex OS kernel was no longer a big demand. Even then, it was an uphill battle, especially once you threw widespread networking and dubious internet-sourced malware into the equation.

End-user software has already seen a decline in quality and increase in user frustration during the cloud era, as many apps have become siloed blobs of JavaScript running on top of an extra copy of your web browser engine. I’m concerned that we’re headed firmly back to the bad old days now, without the release valve of better underlying software stacks on the horizon. The main solution will likely be to rip a lot of this crap out and start over (which is already a pretty widespread approach anyway, my credit union is going on their 3rd online banking “upgrade” in 5 years). But that completely zeroes out the “productivity” gains, not that anyone touting such things will ever measure it that way. I suppose the cost of re-stabilizing the software industrial base will be counted as GDP gains instead.

@SteveMino @cstross i mean, if the house burns down then there won't be much left to inherit

@cstross My mum once sent me this photo with an explanation that she had dropped the iron and wanted to know if I thought it was still safe to use. Even though I will inherit the house when she goes, I did tell her not to use it until I had a chance to fit a new plug