> My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iterat

> My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in quality over the years. I'm sure that's one component. I can also imagine that another component is that in order to broaden the customer base, there is cost pressure as well as the pressure to appeal to more people. The initial market may have consisted of more quality focused nerds who were ok with spending a little more to get a robust thing with more knobs to tune behavior, while the mass market is fine with buying new stuff all the time, given that it's cheaper, and they don't care about fine tuning things, just want it to work out of the box, until they anyway buy a new thing in a year or two.