What software has gotten better?
I was talking with some nontechnical friends who said that updates only make software worse in their experience, and they try to avoid them where possible.
I struggled to name a single piece of non-technical software that has significantly improved in terms of user experience. I've seen better programs replace worse ones (e.g. Discord replacing Skype), but it seems like the general trend is for good software to be ruined, rather than good software becoming better.
Is there anything relatively popular I can point to that bucks this trend?
Web Browsers - Pretty much most of the browsers have improved significantly year over year - likely because of direct competition between each of them. They've added features, optimised performance, resource management, etc.
Open source image editing/processing software has gotten better: Digikam, Darktable, Inkscape, and GIMP. (while Photoshop/Lightroom have gotten worse imo)
Linux and BSDs have gotten significantly better and with better hardware support.
In general, if I had a choice between today's software and the software of 15 years ago, running on today's hardware, I'd choose the software of 15 years ago in a heartbeat.
I would say the Microsoft Office software has definitely gotten better over the years. This applies to the user interface, but also usability and performance. I think they did a great job over the last 25 years improving the software, without making it complicated. annoying or sluggish.
Google Maps has improved a lot over the past few years, especially around public transport and commute.
Having said that, Google is starting to add more ads, which degrades the experience somewhat and I guess proves your friends' point.
PHP, blender (maaaaybe), video stuff i guess because of higher resolution
but everything else seems to be going down the drain of bloat and slowness
-- oops i notice now that you said non-technical stuff
Honestly? Hard to even think of any - maybe Chrome is faster?. Everything seems a worse , huge-padding, mobile-lookalike travesty of what we had 10 years ago. My daily desktop apps are purposely downgraded to old versions: Office 2007, photoshop CS5, the old windows Photos App (because the windows 10 one crashes!), an old PDF reader, old reddit, VLC and others. I wish i could also downgrade skype or adsense reports, or the bluehost.com control panel, or imgur.com, or the vodafone f*ckin payment page, or paypal all of which waste more of my time than they did before.
It's sad really, and should be alaming , but who cares when everyone is sleeping upon piles of cash
KDE as a whole keeps improving every update.
My big WISH to all SWEs and PMs: make software fast again! <3 In 90% of cases I abandon software (like Gmail, like Evernote, like Facebook, ...) because it's unbearably slow.
Apple Maps, improved a lot in past few years, especially noticeable in the US.
Discord replacing Skype is a good example. It was the early consensus that a web app couldn't be better than native and now we have so many amazing examples (GDocs, Figma) and growing.
Probably not ideal for a non-tech example, but I love the improvements made to VS Code over the last 3 years. Plugin support and Azure integrations are insanely productive and nice.
Software that gathers data on you for advertising purposes has gotten a lot better.
I would echo the other commenter on here - developer tools and other FOSS generally improve with each release. Video games too. For instance, Star Wars battlefront II (the new one) sucked at release, and now it’s an excellent FPS.
Hm... Non-technical software you say. I would say Inkscape. Maybe web browsers...?
A lot of updates do make software worse, although there is some FOSS stuff that does get better, but I do not really know if they are sufficiently popular, such as: ImageMagick and SQLite.
Perhaps also of note is that many updates will improve some features and also makes others worse (often the important ones, unfortunately).
Is the issue not that software has improved and their expectations are higher.
I mean how many of your friends could live without their phones?
photo editing software keeps getting better, Photoshop, capture one, etc.
macOS and linux got a lot more secure and stable, so is Microsoft Windows (less random crashes).