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The Year Software Went Bad
- jruohonen 3y agoSo basically technical debt and maintenance overburden.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago>So basically technical debt and maintenance overburden. Roger. That's a very big 10-4. One thing that made software good to begin with was the culture among programmers to make sure their programs were complete, in need of no further development, and worth money before launching a program as a product. Nobody thought it would be sensible to do anything less, but before long lesser thinkers with lesser programs not worth money did gain an undeserved foothold in the forming market. But the playing field didn't tilt fully in their favor until the internet came along. There was just a higher bar back when there was no convenient on-line way to patch bone-headed errors. It's been a predictable downward slide ever since, eventually you have to draw the line somewhere and one way of looking at it is like "suddenly one year, software went bad". Actually I remember the day Microsoft launched Windows Update, I was imediately struck by the feeling "this can't end well". Instead of issuing software that's worth money without the need to "upgrade", we're going to end up with software that wouldn't be worth money even with an update. The dominant software company at the time, setting a bad example ever since. I guess you could also say "suddenly one day, software went bad".