Why We Can't Have Nice Software

Not always! Sometimes it's eg. cognitive biases

Now now... Oftentimes it's Ronald Reagan as well....

Yeah, because being required to a) compete with "capitalist" software and corporations while b) having most developers working only in their free time besides a regular job forced on them by capitalism kind of means capitalism is kind of involved here.

Don't act so smug, you're a hooker just like we all are. We just have the luxury to be somewhat higher class escorts and not crack removed. But we're getting fucked nonetheless.

… did we read the same blog post? Did it mention OSS once?

20 years ago 32-bit systems, CRT monitors, dial-up modems, single core processors or HDDs with most people having 160 GB of storage at most were common. And laptop battery life and thermal performance was just ridiculous in most cases.

Moore's law is mostly dead for commercial crap, i.e. JS-heavy 3rd party spyware filled websites with comparably slow and costly backends and Electron/React Native bloat on desktop/mobile, because shorter time to market and thus paying the devs less is often much cheaper for a lot of companies.

I'd argue free software luckily proves this theorem wrong. There are still a lot of actively maintained, popular programs in C and C++ and a lot of newer ones written in Rust, Dart or Go.

Clock speed and other areas I'd agree have stagnated, but graphics cards, wireless communicaiton standards, cheap fast SSD's, and power efficient CPU's have massively impacted end-user performance in the last 10 years. RISC-V is also a major development that is just getting started.

The vast majority of people are techno illiterate, even within firms that make technology. A handful of people (relatively speaking) are making most of the stuff. Everyone else is just feeding that process. The legal system is set up to motivate the concealment of information about products. You cannot find the documentation to repair embedded systems, even if you have the desire to fix them and the 'right to repair'.

In our village we have a wildly popular 'repair cafe' where people bring their faulty electrical items to be repaired by volunteers. People don't want to toss their duff appliances in landfill but we need the tools and education.

I think the key fault lies in that most companies are publicly traded stock companies.

It challenges what corporations are at the heart. A company owned through stocks is controlled by those stock holders, and exist to make the stock holders money. It's expected for the stock to be worth it by growing, not paying out dividends. (but that is also another layer)

But that's not why a company should exist, it should turn a profit but ultimately it's about being a source of income to its workers. But stocks go against that, since stocks seek to extract money to the non-working owners. Well paid workers is rather contrary to the goal of the stock owners, as long as you can keep going.

The advantage of stock companies were getting investment to start and grow, but it forever shackles the company bar some rich maniac buys the whole thing for his own crazed ideas.

Private companies aren't guaranteed to be good either, but if they are set up right they at least aren't just a funnel of money for the people at the top.

Its because so much money can be gotten out of the perpetual invest, grow, squeeze and sell that things are as they are today. You're not a worthy company if you just increase your cash flow in line with inflation.

The need to grow also comes back as enshitification, planned obsolescence (or just made as cheap as possible), high focus on consumable products or subscriptions to ensure a steady flow of income. Making a product lasting for life? One and done, you'll grow until the market is saturated and then collapse because the cash flow simply won't be there.

Its especially noticeable when the economy takes a hit, all things go from being good investment objects to being something that needs to turn profit. So all the future profit is dropped, tons of layoffs, and rapidly increasing subscription costs. All to counter the reduced demand. Take streaming, the market fragmented, interest rates spiked so holding debt is bad, consumers have less money to spend easily. So the big ones take steps, more ads, crack down on sharing, layoffs, reduced selection and cancelation of various shows and projects. And then stock holders can be happy they once again have a good year and good growth of profit despite turbulent times.

Edit: By contrast a private company is not beholden to any requirement to cancerous growth. It too will be hurt by not having steady cash flow, but they don't need to grow until they are so big that they need constant growth to stay alive. But a private company can be steady for years without problem.

Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.

The idea that corporations, economies or any human ventures in general have to grow infinitely is a very recent invention and obsession. I honestly find it worrying that someone would think it's some sort of deeply ingrained human trait when it's clearly not culturally universal (eg. small hunter-gatherer tribes wouldn't exist otherwise) and not present through all of history. Really goes to show how well the current economic system has been "bought" (har har), and how easily we start thinking that some culturally defined phenomenon or another just has to be a fundamental part of humans. There's a lot of similar thinking around nation states that are ethnically homogenous and based around a shared national cultural identity – people seem to think that that's the default and how things have been since ancient times, but nation states are barely even 200 years old as a concept.

The line has to go up because the current economic system demands it has to go up, not some fundamental feature of the human psyche

in many cases for text docs I'd rather write them using markdown and maybe add some html styling then convert with pandoc

Yep. Exactly the case. Using the multiple instruments instead of one "specially created for this reason" programm become normal. And it become normal because the program become unpredictable in changes. All the functionality is click away, but you need to know what to click.

And as a chery on top Outlook by default uses ctrl+f to forward a message. Instead of starting search.

The two thing you sent are not paid software. Giving example of something that make it's UX shit on purpose is almost a good comparison to OSS software.
Again, there are good counterexample that made UX that are ahead their paid counterpart, but it's an exception, not the rule.

Author point that we can't have nice software because of capitalism, my point was that software developed without money incentive in mind are not nicer either.
Their merit is to be free and open, and that's why a lot of people will use it, not because it has a better UI.

My statement was to dunk on the "that's capitalism fault", to not have nice software. My OSS example is a counter example.