[Silhouette]

But the market has spoken

It has? When was the market given a choice?

I, for one, would be absolutely fine with having fewer shiny new features but also not having software I rely on break all the time. The current culture of just shoving everything out, whatever condition it's in and regardless of the consequences of any potential failure, and saying you'll patch any problems later is toxic and quietly causing enormous damage to our society.

The culture of saying you can sell some hardware product with embedded software, or some software product that is hosted online or based on a subscription model, and then effectively force users who have already committed to that product to accept arbitrary changes whether they want them or not, is also toxic.

We don't know how to reliably write 100% bug-free software, but we do know how to write better software than much of what is produced today. Getting a significant increase in quality isn't even that expensive, since the long-term savings from reduced maintenance and increased productivity help to offset or even outweigh any additional costs during initial development. However, it does require hiring people with actual skill and knowledge to write the software instead of just assembling a cheap team of code monkeys. It also requires your leadership team to actually care about quality and plan to achieve it and provide resources accordingly.

IMNSHO, our industry would benefit from having more developers and leaders with these skills and mindsets, but until there is some form of pressure (and again, I couldn't disagree more that the status quo is a result of genuine customer preference) the economic drivers aren't pushing towards training up new software developers to be better and having leaders plan for good quality products in many cases. After all, why waste time and money doing something right if you can do it wrong but cheaper and still charge almost the same for it anyway? I think we're well overdue for genuine competition in the market and/or regulatory intervention to drive standards up.

[bonoboTP]

Everybody is ignorant, but smart, attentive people are expensive and are not rewarded. Managers get up the ladder by scheming and appearances and alliances, devs are rewarded for padding their CVs, project managers rewarded for introducing new stuff with a short term focus etc. In many cases people just either don't know better, or don't have the time and patience to provide different incentives. This includes the customer who also doesn't understand tech, doesn't see the value in robustness.

And again for an Adobe creative product all this is still fine. Not losing your data is a solved problem and it's called a backup.

I very very much doubt that a person who doesn't bother to back up their professional data (keeps it all on a single device that may break any day) will have the brains and mental models to understand an argument involving software quality and that they should pay premium for something so intangible and abstract as opposed to visible things like features and a modern look and feel/polish.

In some analogous cases with ignorant customers the state steps in and creates consumer protection regulation, but its usually only for really dangerous stuff that can kill you or make you sick, like food safety, not just delete your wedding pics.

[Silhouette]

And again for an Adobe creative product all this is still fine. Not losing your data is a solved problem and it's called a backup.

On this point, I just can't agree. Regardless of whether or not users have effective back-ups -- and we all know that for various reasons, sometimes they don't, even if they believed they did -- it simply isn't acceptable for someone to push out a software patch that destroys data incorrectly.

I don't think it's a trivial thing if someone loses data of great personal value, whether it's wedding photos, or a video of your child's first play at school, or precious footage of a friend or relative who is no longer with you, or just a personal project you've put a lot of work into. These things matter to people, and even if they didn't arrange for effective back-ups, it's not their fault that the data was destroyed in this case, it's 100% on Adobe for screwing up.

In some analogous cases with ignorant customers the state steps in and creates consumer protection regulation, but its usually only for really dangerous stuff that can kill you or make you sick, like food safety, not just delete your wedding pics.

I don't know where in the world you are, so maybe that is the case for you. At least here in the UK, and in Europe more widely, consumer protection laws tend to be quite strong and quite well regarded by the public, and they certainly aren't limited to life-or-death kinds of issues (though of course we have specialised safety regulations in those kinds of areas too).