The natural progression of a software product is from lower quality to higher quality. It's practically a given that a new product will be buggy, because many bugs are revealed only when the product reaches a large number of users. But the quality of the product should improve over time after a series of software updates that introduce fixes and refinements for the issues encounted by users. That's perfectly rational and logical, almost textbook software development. Somehow, though, the tech industry has turned this progression on its head and innovated their way into making existing software products worse in quality over time, less reliable and more buggy. It's a grossly unnatural situation. The questions are, how and why?

I think the "how?" question is easier to answer. I'll call the process "software rebranding". Or perhaps pathology is a better word than process. I've rarely seen a corporate rebranding — that is, a name or logo rebranding — that hasn't been a disaster and made the brand worse. Yet corporations continue to rebrand. Likewise, corporations seem to have an almost pathological compulsion to rebrand their software, to reinvent the wheel, fix what isn't broken, change for the sake of change. For whatever reason, they're unwilling to rest on their laurels, leave well enough alone. The situation has become so perverse that corporations now have to force software updates onto unwilling users who dread them. Various methods of hostile trickery are employed to perpetrate the deed, such as hiding the software update mechanisms or pushing annoying notifications that can't be suppressed.

The "why?" question is more difficult. Many commenters are suggesting that software quality doesn't "sell" in a non-competitive environment, e.g., a corporate duopoly. Quality doesn't move the stock price. But I would suggest that "shiny new features" don't move the stock price either in a non-competitive environment. Once a corporation has already captured its market and eliminated the competition, what good are new features? They're a needless expense when you could just milk the large, sticky user base. And as I already mentioned, the user base doesn't even necessarily want the changes. They're often dragged kicking and screaming into the software rebranding.

I'm not sure there is a rational explanation for the phenomenon. The tech industry is prone to trends, ideologies, you might even say religions. Agile, for instance. (I can't be the only person who looks at the image on the manifesto web page and isn't immediately reminded of the birth of Jesus and the "wise men".) Perhaps there's not a single explanation, though. A situation that's complex and widespread usually has compounding causal factors. I'd guess that in the tech industry it's a common feeling, or fear, that "if you're not innovating, you're dead". Even monopolies might be afraid of stopping the hamster wheel of constant change, regardless of whether their fears are founded.

Another suspicion I've had is that software rebranding is due to what I'll call Press Driven Development. If users aren't loving the rebranding, then who does love it? The press. Or rather, the press doesn't even need to love the branding; they could actually hate the rebranding, as long as they cover the rebranding. All press is good press, which is why bad rebrandings continue to occur, according to my theory. Free advertising for crap is better than no advertising for quality. The press has an endless hunger for new content, and corporate rebrandings, whether logo rebrandings or software rebrandings, feed this hunger. It's a mutually pathological relationship between the big tech companies and the tech press. (Can anyone explain why the vastly overhyped Google login page rebranding got so much press recently?)