[gmueckl]

The free market is preventing technical solutions. People generally buy based on features first and everything else second. This allows for a precarious situation in software market: the company producing the most bloat the fastest wins the biggest market share and sees no need to invest in proper fixes. Everyone that cares about software quality too much gets outcompeted almost immediately.

And since software can be rebuilt and replicated with virtually zero cost, there is no intrinsic pressure to keep unit costs down as it happens in industry, where it tends to keeps physical products simple.

[TheMode]

It doesn't have to come from the free market, FOSS is hardly exempt of awfully slow/unstable software. Nobody figured out yet how to make writing good software the default/path-of-least-resistance.