Gleick was unrepentant. He denied that Pipeline had any bugs. He denied that it was anything as bad as Word. I was a little bit shocked that his year of experience as a software creator, not merely a software user, hadn't given him a smidgen of appreciation for how hard it is to really get bug-free, easy to use software. So I fled, turning down the job offer.
Software has bugs.
CPUs are outrageously finicky. They absolutely refuse to deal with things that they weren't taught to deal with explicitly, and they tend to refuse in the most childish of ways. When my laptop is away from home, it tends to crash a lot because it can't find the network printer it's used to finding. What a baby . It probably comes down to a single line of code somewhere with a teensy tiny almost insignificant bug in it.