@ryo @digdeeper Maximizing profits generally requires minimizing everything else. Even when things were of better quality, it was still the bare minimum that they could get away with at the time, and still generally inferior to what came before.

Meanwhile, if you look even at the USSR, things were generally not as fancy as western technology (that was used as a nice shiny bait to get people hooked on this system of slavery, while communism just used force), but were built to last for as long as possible, since profit wasn't a motivation and there wasn't an entire class of people around dedicating their time to fixing things for you.

In a profit-based system, you need problems to solve, so you either have to make solutions temporary, or to actively create new problems. So there is no real progress on addressing people's issues. The thing that you buy today, you are going to have to buy again every couple years for the rest of your life (unless you buy used stuff that does last and is easy to fix, but most people are not knowledgeable enough to do that, and are addicted to newness, which is something else that this system does, on purpose).

Corporate software as well, has to be made to be bloated and almost impossible to create replacements for. They want governments and other corporations, and the population in general (as young as possible, so they get that software to be used in the school system), to become depend on that software that can never be replaced.

And then, they always need justifications for newer versions, so there always has to be some problem with it. Imagine if corporations made software to be simple. GNU could make an alternative for it, or Suckless, or the OpenBSD team, or anyone. It could also be made practically perfect and never really require a new version, so what would the corporation do? Send everyone home and close down? Saying "our job is done"? No, they need things to always be bad.