Here it's more like the software - any software - is a problem. I agree with GP, and my experience confirms that adding software to something that used to work without it almost universally makes it worse in every aspect, understandability and repairability being just two major ones. On top of that, taking anything that run on old-school industrial/embedded firmware and replacing that with software using modern practices and stacks of the software industry, 100% makes the product go to shit.

That again is a problem of leadership and not of software.

> That again is a problem of leadership and not of software.

SW has an input problem and a testability problem. On one hand, the inputs to the SW are not limited (iMessage happily accepts any image file) and testing is limited to some known inputs. Software vulnerability assesment (worst case analysis) is usually performed outside of the development process at very high costs and limited outcome.

The conversion is pretty much fundamentally corner-cutting of some sort or another. The digital equivalent is usually a micro-controller worth a few cents replacing dollars of bespoke-by-comparison (due to smaller economies of scale) hardware cost. The goal for the exercise is almost always "good enough" instead of trying to best the existing State Of The Art. Power usage I think tends to be one of the few aspects usually improved via digitization.

What is the cause then?

Bad culture that views software as a necessary evil or afterthought rather than an important part of the product.

Same as industrial design then. You get the occasional Braun, Herman Miller or Apple, and a vast number of nondescript silver/beige/black boxes.

It's probably true of lots of aspects of product design - if it's not driven from the top, it's mediocre.

Yeah, unless the engineers are using the product themselves. People in general seem to take care of their own tools. Much harder to get them to look after a product they don’t use themselves.