Agile isn't entirely irrelevant, it's also not the main issue.
It's a cultural one. If someone tells me they work on an 'Agile Development' team my immediate perception is that they are a culture of cargo culting and bike shedding, without putting a ton of thought or care into their product, process, or users. These systems are designed to maximize output, not the quality of the output.
Management is likely out of touch with the demands of creating a high quality product. This leads to misalignment with the development team and probably the business needs. Most businesses need a higher quality product than they have. Some don't, though. In those circumstances it doesn't really matter - I recommend avoiding these places like the plague.
Business is trying to maximize money. It seems like quality has much less of an impact on sales than many of us would wish. I am not sure why it is like that, but as long as it is... it is a financially rational decision to throw unpolished products on the market as fast as possible.
It would be easy to blame the customers. But let's look in the mirror -- how do I make purchase decisions as a customer?
Actually, not a good example, because I usually don't buy software. OK, I buy Windows, but... I don't feel like I have a choice between more polished and less polished versions of Windows. Other than that, I use free software. When I use software at work, someone else made the decision and I had zero input. And that kind of software usually sucks (now I am thinking of Confluence, Jira, and other user-hostile monstrosities).
So I guess a part of the answer is that if you sell software to business, there is no need to make it nice, because the people who decide whether the company buys it are not the ones who will be stuck with using it.
I wish users more aggressive about their software. At least once a week I hear something along the lines of:
> I'm not a technology person, so I can't make X do Y
It would be so much better if the go to response was:
> This technology sucks, so I can't make X do Y. And if it can't even manage to make Y easy, then I'm sure not going to trust it with Z, and I'm going to tell my friends that they shouldn't either.
If the business types need to be reminded that the quality problem is hurting them, then we should coordinate among ourselves to ensure that it hurts even more until they notice.
I think you are on the right track, but realistically I think the answer is even more cynical: the last 20 years in software has been all about refining business models that remove choice and disempower customers. Quality doesn’t matter. Privacy doesn’t matter. Price matters a little, but only in the sense that you need to make your monthly SaaS fee low enough to avoid sticker shock- you don’t need to provide real value though. Just keep milking those monthly fees and make the UI a little worse every year or so.
Lack of interoperability and vendor lock-in, the move toward SaaS software that you run on behalf of your customers, making network effects fundamental to your value prop, bundling, and the enterprise sales tactics you pointed out are all ways that quality of software has been removed from the conversation entirely.
> It seems like quality has much less of an impact on sales than many of us would wish.
This is the unpleasant truth of the matter. As people who hone our craft and want to take pride in our work, a competent developer’s ethos is at odds with maximizing profit.
It's the balance between staying in business, going out of business, reducing employee count, increasing employee count, etc. Also how much unpaid overtime is the dev willing to put into the project. That seems to be what causes most of us to not be allowed to put in the required time for properly sanding the UI.
It's a cultural one. If someone tells me they work on an 'Agile Development' team my immediate perception is that they are a culture of cargo culting and bike shedding, without putting a ton of thought or care into their product, process, or users. These systems are designed to maximize output, not the quality of the output.
Management is likely out of touch with the demands of creating a high quality product. This leads to misalignment with the development team and probably the business needs. Most businesses need a higher quality product than they have. Some don't, though. In those circumstances it doesn't really matter - I recommend avoiding these places like the plague.