It's often noted that the software industry thrived while the rest of industry has been in decline. I don't think this is a coincidence. Software fits well with every bad practice in modern business. What's good for software (at least as a business) is bad for everything else.

Software is a craft product and poor quality has not proved a major hurdle to its sale, it benefits from the kind of strategically-focused corporate management that has proved detrimental to other industries, it creates monopolies and has high margins. Investors love it.

The software business fits an approach to business that is aggressive, focused on destroying competition rather than creating a good product, focused on acquisitions rather than creating new products, etc. Every bad feature of 80s/90s business culture works for software.

Compare America to Japan. America lost out to Japanese industry, but then Japan tried to apply its quality-oriented approach to software. America thrived in software and Japan fell way behind. Why? Because software suited a sales-oriented approach where quality was secondary.

So America's thriving software industry was actually a product of the same business practices that led to chronic short-termism, outsourcing, cost-cutting, low quality, the obsession with mergers and acquisitions, financialization, etc, in every other sector.