Firstly - software is too cheap to ship, and has removed the economic incentive for quality. Floppy discs or CD-ROMs or game cartridges used to cost real money

Firstly - software is too cheap to ship, and has removed the economic incentive for quality. Floppy discs or CD-ROMs or game cartridges used to cost real money. Broken software would be publicly embarrassing and long-lived. Some users might never update and just think your software sucked. So we had to try harder to get software right up front, to test in advance and write code that would make it function in difficult situations. But with no marginal cost to shipping, businesses experiment with the question "how shoddy can our engineering be while still turning a profit?" and "what features can we add for our profit, even if it obstructs or hurts users?". They run those experiments daily now. I believe this has successfully brought down quality norms in almost all categories of software: UIs respond in 100s or 1000s of ms as standard, not 10s. You lose your train of thought often with bad UIs, and they're all differently bad. Secondly - a user in 2021 is less likely to be the person directly supporting the author of that software. So the users' decision to use (or bin) the software for the long run doesn't need to be core of any software business' success. They can be compelled into using bad software by network effects (I know, pioneered by 90s Microsoft but the internet turbo-charged this). That's not just about evil business models; bad government or banking software has forced lots of people to bad software who never wanted a computer in the first place. Thirdly - the other surprising evil from the network is the end of data ownership. After all the fuss 20 years ago about the politics of the MS Word file format, many users can't reliably separate data from the application that processes it any more. File format interoperability (whether reverse-engineered or open) used to be a smart way in for new competitors - do more things with your old data. Now that's impossible without continued cooperation of the companies producing the data. APIs to online data are treacherous and only kept around while they serve the business, not its users. So many "experience" apps aren't even clear what data they keep for you, and the law is still catching up. Don't get me wrong, it's (maybe) a good thing that there are more people in 2022 doing things with software than there were in 2002. It's very often enabling. But the ideal of a computer being a tool or a "bicycle for the mind" is something you have to choose & fight for now. (OS security & power management "innovation" is the other end of this rant, but for another day :) )