40 years ago I drove a brown Fiat strata, perhaps one of the 10 worst cars ever made.

It went 0 to 60 in about 19 seconds. It got about 20 miles to the gallon. The backseat was remarkably uncomfortable. It handled poorly and it was really ugly.

Today, for about the same number of inflation adjusted dollars,

I drive a Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid.

It gets 199 miles to the gallon.

It goes 0 to 60 just as fast as I need it to.

It's super safe, and the backseat is quite comfortable.

Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx and you're listening to a special archived episode of

akimbo.

I don't really want to talk about cars today.

I want to talk about software and I want to talk about why software is so bad.

I developed my first computer game as a hobby in 1976

when I was in high school, and I was super fortunate in the early 80s to do it professionally.

In those days making games for the Commodore 64, our major limitation was hardware. This is what the music sounded like.

The text was so clunky it was almost unreadable. The graphics were nothing to write home about.

We were busy pioneering how software might work. At the time I was beta testing the original Mac and

the Mac was a revelation. On that Mac I had a word processor. Soon after that, a spreadsheet. Today, 40 years later, I have a

word processor that does almost exactly what that word processor did 40 years ago. I have a

spreadsheet Google Sheets that does less than the spreadsheets I used to pay for.

Sure it's free, sure it's connected and can have

multiple users which makes it even more useful. But in terms of software

development if we leave aside the network effects, most of the things that I

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