I agree that commercial incentives are not there, you must always ship earlier than competition rather than waiting for a few months or years to have a more stable product.
However it probably can hurt a brand reputation in the long run if you have a quality level below customer expectation.
Customers are so used to things not working at times though that the bar is not that high.
So the quality we see would seem on average in line with expectations.
Especially if things work most of the time and just fail to live up to expectations some of the time.
I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. I mean, isn’t capitalism supposed to drive innovation?
It seems to me that OP places a high level of usefulness or value of software at lower levels of abstraction, and I don’t disagree—it’s akin to how any manufacturing business is tremendously more valuable than the variety of consumer-facing products that can be made from it—but the cost of entry into such a business domain, and actually succeeding to make a profit, is often high.
The top five global companies by market cap, i.e. the "most valuable" by market metric, are Apple, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Alphabet, and Amazon.
From that I conclude that higher abstraction and making consumer-facing products through vertical integration (Apple) is more valuable than straightforward manufacturing. As is the old scheme of owning land with a valuable resource under it. And starting your company's name with the letter A.
OK, but then that’s not really what I wanted to say (and perhaps I really should have avoided the word “value”). Sure, those companies are the most valuable at the moment in terms of profits, but they are subject to the whims of customer tastes, which do tend to change every 10 years or so, and so they could eventually fall. A company that is in the business of manufacturing computer hardware, however, is far less affected by changes in consumer tastes because they could just make any computer according to the form factor of the decade, and could last much longer than the companies that use its outputs as raw materials or components.
So then if a company’s products or services lasts over generations, isn’t that actually more useful than another company’s products which people only throw away after some time? If the longevity of production of a product or service is not proof of the universality of a need, what is?
However it probably can hurt a brand reputation in the long run if you have a quality level below customer expectation.