Digital Home Thoughts: InfoWorld: Is Software Quality Getting Worse?

"With all the recent news stories about zero-day bugs in IE and anti-virus updates that quarantine AOL or Excel, you might wonder whether the quality of software products is deteriorating. Judging from the everyday complaints the GripeLog hears about software that just doesn't work, I'd say you need wonder no longer. Software is indeed buggier than ever. Software bugs have been with us ever since there's been software, and customers have certainly shown a willingness to tolerate glitches that would be unacceptable in other industries. But it's a little harder for customers to understand how today's software giants with their large quality control departments can so often prove unable to deal with bugs that can render their products unusable."

This article doesn't directly deal with photo/video/audio applications, but reading through it I certainly saw the parallel. I absolutely agree with the assertion that software quality has gone down the tubes - software is certainly more capable these days, but it also seems to crash more as a result of that added capability. There are many times I'm reviewing software and I just shake my head at the sloppy design, the sluggish performance, and the unstable mess software leaves my computer in. That's the primary reason I bought a separate computer just for testing software - I've had so many bad experiences putting my main workstations at risk by installing software, that I have to isolate the software tests on a machine that I reformat on a regular basis. Is that sad or what?