It's timely, well-researched, and interesting. Minasi's thesis is simple enough. Software publishers know how to produce software without bugs, he asserts, supporting the claim with an account of Watts Humphrey's career at Carnegie-Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute and the Capability Maturity Model that came out of it. That's where the conspiracy comes in. Software publishers have economic incentives to devote their resources to adding features rather than squashing bugs.
Software is no good, in short, because users accept poor-quality applications.
Minasi's analysis rests on several assumptions. First, he asserts with nothing more than a few anecdotes as evidence that most software is buggy. Although he doesn't say so, he is talking about the small minority of packages that are sold commercially. The Software Conspiracy doesn't really touch on software that is developed by corporations for internal use, nor on software developed for embedded systems. Minasi's heart may be in the right place, but this is a wrongheaded chapter.