Getting quality right has never been easy. In the good old days, the recipe for quality, at least, was clear: get your requirements right, get your plan right, get your process right, detect deviations early, find and eliminate the root-causes. By definition, good quality equaled to absence of bad quality.

I was a Microsoft-man for two decades. Unlike most other people I thought Microsoft did well with quality. I acknowledge that they shipped too many bugs. Every now and then they failed miserably with the user interface. Sometimes there were compatibility problems, too. However, the products were designed for purpose and they were easy to learn.