The downfall of software

Almost any piece of software you use today tends to be littered with bugs, run poorly or is visibly unfinished, whether it's an OS (looking at you Windows), a mobile app, or a SAAS by some YC backed startup valued at some crazy amount of money, like that means anything nowadays.

What even makes good software? I'd say it's several factors. The most important one is that it does the job it's intended to do very well. This also implies that it should be as bug free as possible, almost completely. The next important factor is speed, it shouldn't be unnecessarily slow. It is perfectly fine if not every algorithm is perfectly optimized, but you also shouldn't use say 5 different loops for something that can easily be achieved with only one. I'd also add that the software should do only what it's intended to do rather than being “bloated” with dozen other much less relevant features. Some might not agree with this, but I think that is a fundamental step for bringing the main purpose close to perfection since you are focused on one thing only.

How does an average piece of software hold against that criteria? I'd argue that only a small minority satisfies all the requirements. Two most notable shortcomings are presence of bugs and poor performance. It has become a norm that when something doesn't work, you just refresh the page - this is so common nowadays that we don't even register doing it every time. If a refresh doesn't help, you wait, and if waiting does not solve the issue (depending on how patient you are), you might eventually find yourself angrily submitting a report claiming that the app sucks and nothing works, that is if the form for submitting bug reports exists in the first place.

This wasn't always the case. Let's compare two popular operating systems: Windows XP and Windows 11. Windows XP is remembered as a simple and reliable operating systems and back in the day, people refused to upgrade for a long time just because of how good it was. I still know of some businesses which use it today, and while it's definitely time for them to upgrade, Windows XP is holding up surprisingly well. Windows 11 on the other hand, completely different story. My girlfriend recently bought a pretty decent laptop and I was excited how much you can get for your money in terms of hardware. Unfortunately, I found myself very disappointed once we started using it, it felt sluggish. And the reason for that - Windows 11 being a resource hog. What a sad story, If only we could put Linux on it…

Another amazing piece of software is FFmpeg - a tool for audio/video encoding and decoding. It's over 20 years old and is still in use today, not just in legacy systems but in widely recognized tools like OBS and HandBrake. There simply isn't a good replacement for it - because it doesn't need to be replaced, it works extraordinarily well. FFmpeg is proof that if something is done right, it lasts.

So, what's with modern software, why is it seemingly of much lower quality? Why don't we have more Windows XPs than Windows 11s? The reason for that is business. World moves at a rapid pace. People are expecting everything immediately. Development teams are often restricted with not long enough deadlines, not because managers are evil and like to torture developers, but because you can quickly become irrelevant. If you have a great software idea, it might take you a year to implement it and bring it to perfection, but someone else might half ass it, release it six months before you, and despite having inferior product, they will probably capture a much larger part of market share due to simply being first.

Perfectly optimized, bug-free software is a developers dream, but simply not a business viable option. In order to make money you have to accept that you will be releasing lots of unoptimized buggy software that's just good enough.