Software went the way of everything else that got big. It's made for millions of people at once, which means it's made for nobody exactly, and the person using it is rarely the person it was made for. Their attention, their data, and their difficulty leaving are all worth more than their satisfaction.
Other industries went through this and came out the other side. Food was mass production until people wanted a baker again. Furniture, clothes, beer, coffee: the same arc, from one factory serving everyone to small makers serving someone. Software is due. The work is finally quick and accessible enough that a shop down the road can build the thing you actually need, and you can have it in days.
That means software stops being something only large organizations can commission. A person at home with an idea can have it. A barber shop, a tattoo studio, a practice with four people, a club, a group of neighbors, a school running on paper. Most of them were never told this was available to them. It is.
Every one of those came with decisions already made, and none of them were yours.
Your files should be yours to move. Two services that could talk to each other should talk. Leaving should be as easy as arriving was. The difficulty was built on purpose, which means it can be unbuilt, and it should be.
A tool should do what one person does, in the words they use, and nothing else. The version handed to a hundred thousand people at once was never a design decision. It was a limitation, and it no longer holds.
And there should be a person on the other end. Not a form, not a chatbot, not a queue. Software made for people should be reachable by them.
None of this is complicated. It was simply never anyone's job to insist on it. It should be.
