Many people redicule about the bloated, buggy and slow-performing software that companies produce – especially from Micro$oft due to their dominance in this department. However, I think these buggy software products is a major force in lifting the economy.
First of all, bloated and buggy software takes a lot of resource to produce (Longhorn should be called longhaul for example) and even more resource to maintain. Hundreds of thousands of software developers have to be hired to write those software products. And millions more of technology workers have to be hired by companies using those software to train and maintain them. This definitely helped the job market.
Secondly, slow running software not only means more employees are needed to run them, but more importantly it justfies and encourages home users and business users alike to continue to upgrade computer hardwares to keep up with the latest software demand. The world without the like of Microsoft would be bleak and gloomy – we will be all running computers with Linux which see no reason to upgrade beyond the 486 CPU with 16MB of memory and 500MB hard drives. The world of computing would have been forever devided between the elite super computer users and the lowly home users. Unlike today, we pretty much all have supercomputers of yesteryear at our fingertips in order to run the latest Office software at 3D resolution.
So “bad” software is good for the economy. It spurs job market. It pushes the envelope of computer technology. It continues to push the consumption of hundreds of billions of dollars of high-end computing equipments down market to average homes and offices.