Where should the type information be 242

This is an excellent example of an effect I only recently recognized. The success of Really Bad Software(tm) can be mostly explained by the fact that the buyers can;t tell whether the software is working or not. Since they can't tell good software from bad software, bad software wins in the marketplace.

The effect I only recently recognized is related to the slope of the above relationship. As the users become less capable the software is going to get worse. The more ignorant the buyers are the more room there is for Really bad Software(tm) to be successful and the smaller the market gets for good software. So there is no reasonable expectation that the quality of popular software will improve and considerable reason to believe it will continue to decline.

As the majority of the population becomes completely clueless about basic skills such as the 3Rs, we should expect technical merit to become essentially irrelevant and marketing to control software sales. WHG3 pioneered the market for Really Bad Software and now we should expect the software industry to follow his lead. It worked realy well in hardware (c.f., Intel's success selling Really Bad Hardware(tm)), so there's no reason it shouldn't work in software except for non-market forces such as open source which have no real parallel in hardware.)

tj3