The given examples are no so much about software getting worse but specifically web programming to do so. Here the answer is clearly yes, web programming is in

The given examples are no so much about software getting worse but specifically web programming to do so. Here the answer is clearly yes, web programming is in a suboptimal phase at the moment with web programmers acting more like carpenters who try to cobble up a house using only IKEA flat-packed products which they jury-rig together using copious amounts of glue, packing tape and baling twine than like the artisan of old who went into the woods with an axe and built himself a log cabin. True, the log cabin was rather spartan but it it kept out the elements and lasted a long time. The IKEA mansion has all the furnishings you want and some of them even work, sometimes. Often they don't, the lights go dim when you want them bright or end up blinding you just when you dozed off in bed, the dishwasher only works when the washing machine is first switched on and off, the doorbell rings day and night except for when someone is actually at the door, etc. Blame the enormous amount of churn in the web tool world, the chase after the latest fads, the fact that many 'web programmers' entered this field not so much because they like the intellectual challenge of solving puzzles but because it pays well, the fact that project targets keep on moving or whatever. Commercial software is getting 'worse' in that the distinction between customer and product is disappearing. A product is that what is made by a company in order to sell it to a customer so the company gets to make money. A customer is he who buys a product from a company because he deems it fit for some purpose. That was then but now things have changed. Final sales are making way for rental agreements, products are turning into advertising and data mining applications to be used by companies to herd and milk their customers. Customers are thus productised and sold to other companies who target them with directed advertising based on what was harvested earlier. Free software is still mostly freed from this plague - although even there it sometimes shows up, e.g. the Shopping lens [1] which appeared in Ubuntu 12.04 and only recently disappeared was an unwelcome reminder of this phenomenon - so there is a way out.