Fascinating how perception has changed since then; I think most people today would have the opposite sentiment: "How did software get so unreliable?" My guess

Fascinating how perception has changed since then; I think most people today would have the opposite sentiment: "How did software get so unreliable?" My guess is: software creation and distribution became exponentially more accessible around that time (1996) with the advent of the web. Not only were many less-qualified individuals creating software (which isn't intrinsically a bad thing!), many more people were consuming software (making consumer software a much more lucrative market), and technology changes allowed companies to "move [much] fast[er] and break [more] things". Businesses were always optimizing for profits, and the dot com boom simply changed the equation to where reliability was no longer profitable in the majority of the field.