Quality
«Now I’ll revert back to my root-of-all-evil talk. I think most people agree that the problems in the software industry are caused by the pace of the pace of the software industry. There isn’t enough time to develop good software? But why not? Why can’t people just take more time? Greed, money, power, blah blah blah.»
—”Brain-Wash”
I think the point Adam is missing here is that what drives this greed is the free-market, screwed up capitalist system. If you look at open source, things change drastically. Perl, for being a fifteen year old code base, is fantastically reliable. Perl now has a suite of 25,000 regression tests. Looking elsewhere, the reliability of Linux and OpenBSD is amzing considering the source of the contributions. In general, it seems that the quality of software can be (and often is) high where the people making the decisions are those that have an interest in seeing the product work, and where they are also the implementors.
So obviously what needs to be done now is to brain-wash the masses to accept the reality that open-source is their best bet (because quite honestly, the mere fact of being reality doesn’t seem to be convincing people very fast).