Agreed. What a lot of people here in HN don't seem to realize is that the reason why Software Is Eating the World is because software can be really really bad,

Agreed. What a lot of people here in HN don't seem to realize is that the reason why Software Is Eating the World is because software can be really really bad, and still be better than not-software. When presented with "a pile of enterprise Java garbage code produced by crap devs that just barely works", your software customer's BATNA is "pencil and paper". That's a low bar.