Like it or not, this has been happening for years. The worst of these abuses tend to happen after tools make a new medium "easy", and before the tools mature enough to make it easy to be good.

In the years after Microsoft's Visual Basic made Windows development easy, thousands of new developers made the leap from Excel macros to building Windows applications, and many of them were truly awful. Personally, I wish this weren't true, because I always loved what VB did for the industry, but I can't deny the junk that was unleashed on unsuspecting users.

Later, Active Server Pages and PHP made web development easy, and you got a whole new round of junk. In this case, you can mix in a good dose of HTML design butchery, too, yielding some truly ransom note-inspired applications that happened not to run very well, either.

An optimist would look at the coming service-based applications and hope that at least the stuff that's run in the back-end services will work right. This is true in the same sense that we now use libraries in our development frameworks to handle data structures like stacks and linked lists, rather than coding them ourselves.

The advances in our tools allow us to elevate our bugs to new, grander scale, and this, Chris, is what we call progress.

I don't think there's that much danger in the quality of software going down. The truth is that software engineers are not very good at finding out what people actually want to do with software. Instead of learning how to do this, they decide that what users really want is easy development tools that let them build their own solutions. In other words, what users really want is to become software engineers!

Of course, in reality, this is the last thing that most users want.

Here's an article that makes the same argument for financial literacy: Stop trying to turn everyone into a financial planner. Instead, design (financial) products that do what people want them to do.

@alsomike: I like the comparison to the financial world. Managing investments can be approached as a hobby by the curious, and software development is similar. Each seems accessible and even intriguing, but of course each is rife with pitfalls. You could lose your shirt by chasing the latest exotic financial products, and you could alienate customers and erode your brand by slapping together bad software.

The interesting difference is that, in the software world, it is possible to understand what users want, and it's also possible to build something that corresponds to it. In the financial world, it simply may not be possible to deliver on what investors want: reliable positive return on investment. Because of this, the financial industry has created a lucrative side venture: The publication of books about how to do it yourself, without the aid of the financial industry. In fact, I wish I could invest in a "Do-it-yourself investing book" future. I would leverage the heck out of that bad boy.

It's so easy to download and/or trial software now, that bad software or software that doesn't provide a good initial user experience, will find punishment much more quickly and viciously than ever before, e.g. Vista. That "wow is now" campaign might have been a home run if blogs didn't exist and the word about Vista's awful UX hadn't gotten out on day zero.

Tapping the cluetrain manifesto's thesis about markets being conversations, I guess.

Conversely "easier to use but harder to learn" software (like Vim) that has a learning curve might find it harder to get traction. It pushes out what Kathy Sierra calls the "I rule" moment.

Joel Spolsky parodies Salesforce's claims in a 2006 article:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/05.html

And there's an interesting related conversation taking place right now about the iTunes App store for the iPhone:
http://www.wilshipley.com/blog/

Thought provoking piece, Chris!