alt Hacker NewsBetter software means nearly nothing at the end of the day.
The software that gets used is the metric that really matters.
You can write 'perfect' software that runs at 100% efficient and never makes a mistake, but if no one ever downloads it and uses it, you've just engaged in a bout of intellectual masturbation.
And honestly I've seen the 'write better software' people complain for years as Microsoft just absolutely financially decimates them. And yea, Microsoft loves writing bloated electron crap. And "one of these days Alice, people are going to rise up and use less bloated software and Microsoft is going to die", lol, just fucking kidding, people will never do that.
Bun and uv were better software than their alternatives and gained massive traction quickly, leading to them selling out for a big payday. Better software has to overcome a massive marketing advantage, ecosystem capture, and inertia, but people are absolutely interested in using things that aren't buggy bloated bullshit where they have a choice.
I don't really know why you brought Microsoft up. I don't know anyone who thinks writing better software can displace Windows. Windows has absolute ecosystem capture, notably on the hardware front -- you can't write a better OS even if you want to because hardware vendors simply won't work with you, and even if you did write a better OS you have to contend with not having 30 years of software developed for it. Computers are increasingly falling into the domain of professionals (with smartphones displacing casual consumer usage), who need Photoshop, Excel, and all of the rest of professional tools and would put up with an inferior OS out of necessity, because the tools are more important than the OS.
Even then, Windows is an excellent piece of software, technically. It is handicapped by explicit anti-consumer decisions shoving things users don't want into it, but the kernel is hands down better than Linux's kernel, and the userspace is superior on technical merits if not user-friendliness merits. Windows has been going downhill in more recent years, but the gap between it and Linux is still massive.
Really, I don't know how Microsoft is your go-to example, when they are actually a producer of excellent software. Excel, the modern .NET ecosystem, C#, and Typescript are top-tier, and VSCode is perhaps the only software I've used that justifies being an Electron application, because it actually exposes the capability to completely customise every aspect of it and extend it with sandboxed extensions. To the extent people have grievances with Microsoft, it is largely because of deliberate monopolistic practices rather than the technical quality of their software.
I guess you are conceding that LLMs can't write good software, but are suggesting that good software doesn't matter. I think it does matter very much. In cases of monopoly control, people will begrudgingly use bad software, but they won't be loyal and you will bleed users over time as the frustrations build. But I think most critically, in cases where you don't already have monopoly control, nobody will use your bad software. This is why we haven't seen any vibe coded applications really taking the world by storm despite all the LLM hype. OpenAI and Anthropic can make you use their bad software because it's the gate to a useful proprietary tool, which is their real attraction, but Random Startup #482942 cannot make you use their bad software. Creating good software doesn't guarantee that Random Startup #482942 will succeed, given other market factors, but creating bad software guarantees they won't succeed.