Decades have passed before we had a yet high quality consumer software. It is now taken that software supposes to be crashy, laggy and barely functional. Why and how we get here? When the question is asked, many people felt the nostalgia, where the software is simpler, and people crafts their cathedral. They often overlooked the fact that the software we built today, was many orders of magnitudes more complex than software we had in 1980s. Even today’s software with simplest tableau operations, its graphic user interface combining with the complex animations and multi-touch interactions, if, built from scratch, requires many months of developer time.

For what I can remember, concept of quality was popularized in 1970s from Japan. 1970s, through the quest for quality, the Japanese auto industry reached the level of low cost that its American competitors could only dream of.