Oh believe me, I use a lot of corporate software where the flaws in development are obvious, without knowing any of the people involved

Doesn’t the fact you do use it mean the customer (the one who chooses the vendor) did not care, though?

If you're in one place for more than a few years, you become the person making these choices, and you don't forget.

That's obviously different because at the corp level there are politics involved in choosing one vendor over another, but at the same time wheverer I'm involved in the decision process I care to avoid these products as hell.

Choices of vendor are not binary. There are tradeoffs between available solutions in software. Software Quality is not a linear gradient.

If your solution is the best compromise, it is more likely to be selected.

Well at companies is much less compromise than politics. Over decaces I saw two main schemas:

- product must be purchased because its vendor is somehow connected to the upper management or the investor

- product must be purchased because the person who has chosen the product is at the moment perceived as having some kind of holy cow status and can't be criticized, so people around put that to the extreme

Happening at most of companies everywhere.

Poor choices during development reveal themselves in many ways: poor performance, awkward workflows, mandatory upgrades, one-way data conversions, inaccurate documentation, and so on.

> Poor choices during development reveal themselves in many ways: ...

All the examples you provided miss the point. Revenues are the point; all the rest is ancillary at best.

I'm not sure what you mean. jagged-chisel asked how we look for smart choices in the software we download and install. I gave examples of how poor choices manifest for end users, the idea being that a lack of those issues suggests smart choices. I don't see how revenue is relevant to the question. Revenue for whom? And how did my examples miss the point exactly?

> Poor choices during development reveal themselves in many ways: poor performance, awkward workflows, mandatory upgrades, one-way data conversions, inaccurate documentation, and so on.

Not necessarily. Some otherwise good systems might have one bug in each of those categories.

And, most other poorly designed and poorly executed systems just chug along fine without the customer realising anything.

Sure, fine, a well-designed system can have bugs and a giant ball of duct tape and twine can work great.

That's not the norm though and I hope we can all acknowledge that.