Up to this point, software systems have evolved in an environment where market monopolies were the norm and therefore a 'chosen few' software tools, libraries a

Up to this point, software systems have evolved in an environment where market monopolies were the norm and therefore a 'chosen few' software tools, libraries and frameworks have had an abundance of resources and talent dedicated to them. It's hard for me to imagine an environment where software is constrained by the availability and cost of engineering talent and where maintainability becomes the number 1 priority. So far, I suspect that maintainability has ranked VERY LOW on the list of priorities. The only reason some systems are maintainable today is because maintainability is correlated with security which is a bit higher priority. I feel like the priority of software development over the last decade has been 'shipping fast' as enshrined in Facebook's motto "Move fast, break things." everything else has been neglected in favor of shipping fast. So I can understand the author's point of view that software is likely to experience a decline; it was not built to last and thus requires an unreasonable amount of human resources to maintain.