Technik

The internet made code brittle because updates could happen anytime. Pre-internet, your software came in a box and that was it for this version. Companies had to test the hell out of it. Even after we got internet updates, but before broadband, people had to deliberately seek out updates, download them at painfully slow speeds, and maybe even write them to a disk to install them. I remember a MacOS update that spanned fourteen floppies.

But that simplifies things too much. Our software is also infinitely more complex. Getting into the business of trying to ship new and exciting features over maintaining a solid foundation also eats the industry.