Yes, shrinkwrap software is/was like building a ship. You had to get it seaworthy on the first go and could maybe hope for a little touch-up at some friendly po

Yes, shrinkwrap software is/was like building a ship. You had to get it seaworthy on the first go and could maybe hope for a little touch-up at some friendly port later on. Neither the process nor materials were perfect, but robustness, resilience, and completeness had to be part of the plan. The dominance of continuous deployment and auto-update culture changed it from ship-building into something more like an exquisite corpse or papier mache project, where people just constantly tack new things on, pull old things off, and rush to make repairs as haphazardly as can be gotten away with. In a giant software market, they both have their place and both bring upsides/downsides, but they're radically different ways of making software and some of us strongly prefer one approach to the other.