Interesting piece (see link below) about software quality going down in a world where hardware quality is culminating to levels never seen before. Here are a few of my thoughts on this subject.

First, I think the law of entropy is much more active in software than in hardware. We are actually witnessing the slow disorganization of software (both in features & code), hence the quality goes down with it.

Second, we are also witnessing the (good and bad) consequences of unsustainable complexity of a growing software ecosystem. The good is the added value of combining things together in order to make the whole greater than the sum of its part. Apple is good at this. The bad is the difficulty to make it all work.

Third, take the Finder in macOS. How many revisions has been done on this essential piece of software and by how many generations and teams of developers? How one company make sure, from one generation to the other, the knowledge about how the Finder is coded doesn’t get diluted? I see this as an important challenge.

Finally, the marriage of hardware with software, the complete integration of the stack that Apple is able to achieve because they nearly own all the pieces pose big challenges. There are so many combinaisons to test and optimize. I can see many bugs falling between the cracks.

I’m not excusing Apple for the fact that their software quality is going down. They must slowdown and consolidate their software assets. In a maturing world, I would expect they do just that.

Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump