> This obviously doesn't represent all of the billions of dollars spent on software like Salesforce, SAP, Realpage, Booking.com, etc. etc. (all notoriously buggy, slow, and complex software). You can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the quality of the product. They get real nice paychecks, benefits and put dinner on the table for their families. That's the market.

Those first three are "enterprise" or B2B applications, where the person buying the software is almost never one of the people actually using the software. This disconnect means that the person making the buying decision cannot meaningfully judge the quality of any given piece of software they are evaluating beyond a surface level (where slick demos can paper over huge quality issues) since they do not know how it is actually used or what problems the actual users regularly encounter.

Now imagine how much they would make if their software was good.

Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code. They have to because bugs, bad performance, outages, vulnerabilities have very direct and immediate costs for them. I know Amazon and Microsoft have their critics but I bet they are also better than we give them credit for.

There are factors besides software quality that affect their success. But running bad software certainly isn’t going to help.

> You can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the quality of the product.

What about caring and being depressed because quality comes from systems rather than (just) individuals?

SAP, Salesforce, Booking.com… all awful products. We use them because monopolies.