Fascinating how perception has changed since then; I think most people today would have the opposite sentiment: "How did software get so unreliable?"
My guess is: software creation and distribution became exponentially more accessible around that time (1996) with the advent of the web. Not only were many less-qualified individuals creating software (which isn't intrinsically a bad thing!), many more people were consuming software (making consumer software a much more lucrative market), and technology changes allowed companies to "move [much] fast[er] and break [more] things".
Businesses were always optimizing for profits, and the dot com boom simply changed the equation to where reliability was no longer profitable in the majority of the field.
My guess is: software creation and distribution became exponentially more accessible around that time (1996) with the advent of the web. Not only were many less-qualified individuals creating software (which isn't intrinsically a bad thing!), many more people were consuming software (making consumer software a much more lucrative market), and technology changes allowed companies to "move [much] fast[er] and break [more] things".
Businesses were always optimizing for profits, and the dot com boom simply changed the equation to where reliability was no longer profitable in the majority of the field.