Software is what makes hardware useful. I see this with a lot of IOT companies I deal with. Great hardware but the software is often a mess and an afterthought.

Software is what makes hardware useful. I see this with a lot of IOT companies I deal with. Great hardware but the software is often a mess and an afterthought. So, you end up with users of that hardware either having to write a lot of software themselves or being severely limited and restricted by the software that comes with the hardware. Quantum computing is not going to be very useful until normal programmers can work with it. If you need a Ph. D. in theoretical physics to even understand what is happening, there are not going to be a lot of people that qualify. I don't see this happening very soon. Right now quantum computing has three problems: - few people even understand what it does and fewer are capable of explaining that in a sane way. Articles on this topics are using a lot of quantum computing cliches and bad analogies (cats in boxes, etc.) to make it seem like it's some kind of dark magic that will solve any problem trivially. It does not help that professional snake oil sellers like IBM are all over it either. - Current hardware is not very practical, useful, or cheap. Not enough qubits to do much useful things, lots of issues related to error detection and mitigation, not scalable. - The only quantum computer software that exists is essentially proofs of concept and research prototypes. Basically it shows that if we had a working quantum computer, we might be able to make it do some useful things. But nobody has gotten there just yet.