The building blocks of the information society are crumbling even as they placed into the foundation. We do not accept this level of quality in many other things we buy. Televisions and cameras have money-back guarantees. If a waiter brings us disappointing food, we send it back. Our attitude towards software seems oddly forgiving.
Software is more mysterious than other commodities to most people.
We often do not have great variety in the suppliers of software we want. There is not a tradition of software quality either in computer professionals or consumers. And we seem to be willing to buy low quality software as long as the initial price is sufficiently low. We assert that these reasons are not compelling, either ethically or economically. We contend that a new attitude is in order.