> Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried? I think part of the problem is that we are focusing on the wrong thing in a lot of area

> Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried? I think part of the problem is that we are focusing on the wrong thing in a lot of areas. Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from. Achieving 9 9's is not something you can explicitly set out and do as your primary objective. It is a side-effect of other quality choices made in aggregate. Looking at a subset of an entire system and asking "is that database resilient to x 9's" and then worrying about that as your new target is how you wind up with something so inherently complex that the effective resiliency is somewhere around a single machine circa 1999. Instead of looking at every piece of hardware as a potential time bomb, you could start to embrace higher-quality components and arrive back at something that resembles a mainframe again.