It's true that there are rose-tinted spectacles at work here, but I don't think modern software is as great as all that. Today's version of a blue screen might

It's true that there are rose-tinted spectacles at work here, but I don't think modern software is as great as all that. Today's version of a blue screen might be something in us-east-1 being down again and taking half the software on the Internet offline with it, but the effect is much the same, and now you can't necessarily do anything about the outage, you just have to wait until whoever is responsible for the failed infrastructure to decide your problem is important enough to fix next. It's not just cloud, either. I recently had a combination of two popular pieces of software, both widely used by professional programmers, where a plugin was crashing the host application when even basic functionality was triggered. The problem was sufficient that I had to abandon using them and ended up writing that program in a different programming language because it was faster than messing around with broken tools. It turns out that some of these much-touted modern standards for interoperability and portability aren't all that great after all. And of course, while we don't get a literal blue screen any more, it's not as if Windows 10 and several other popular operating systems don't frequently break users' devices, sometimes catastrophically, when rolling out updates. We've just come to expect (by which I really mean, been forced to accept) this culture of shoving broken stuff out and fixing it later, even in the most essential software like our operating systems. Meanwhile, the last time I saw significant instability on any desktop OS prior to quite recently, I think I was running Windows 95. So maybe the spectacles aren't that rose-tinted after all.