[alexvoda]

I think the article is an unsupported pile of red herrings even though I think apparently the software "quality" has indeed gone down, non-uniformly.

The simple explanation for that is that you, the user, are not the customer. A lot of software today simply does not need to cater to the needs of the user because the user has no choice in using the software or not. This is either because of network effects, monopolies, DRM or simply not having the decision power within a hierarchy. Even if software development practices are better than ever, the software developers are less aligned with software users than ever. It is an increasingly adversarial relationship.

It is not quality that has gone down, it is an alignment problem.