Maybe I've been in this industry too long but it seems like the quality of hardware and software, in general, just continues to decline. Of course, there are the exceptions and I certainly appreciate them more than ever. However, I don't recall a time when I've run into so many flaky products, both personally and via the recantations of others. And it goes beyond just computers because Anything+Computer=Computer (and acts like one too).

Maybe the boom times enabled companies to rest on their laurels and thumb their noses at making good products for us. If that's the case, the bursting of the "Internet bubble" may be the kick-in-the-pants that the industry needs in order for us, the consumers, to get what we expect and pay for.

What do you think?

I voted "perhaps" because I haven't owned enough equipment to be absolutely certain.

One thing that pisses me off is the poor quality of power supplies. I've had several just quit on me. Some even burned with actual smoke coming out of the system. I'm pretty sure one PS failure caused damage to other system components. It got so bad I ordered a PS tester from Antec. If a machine won't POST, the first thing I suspect is the power supply. Grrrrrrrr.

I wasn't going to list examples but maybe a few would be helpful as it may spark some memories of stuff that you, a friend, or a relative have run into.

- Cell phones that sound bad, lock up, have buggy features, bad reliability
- Cell services that have lots of dead zones, flaky billing, dropped calls, force you into one or two year contracts
- Video cards that don't operate properly (e.g. unable to set refresh rates) and require third-party tools to make them do what the manufacturer should've done in the first place
- Sound cards that work better with old drivers included with the OS rather than the latest ones from the manufacturer
- Internet providers that drop your connection, have frequent outages, slow connections, slow DNS servers, over allocated modems/networks
- Hosting providers that have lousy uptime and flaky servers
- Gaming devices that don't work reliably or as advertised even after several versions of hardware or software
- Motherboards that require BIOS updates to make add-on cards work (imagine if we still had BIOS on EPROM where the manufacturer didn't have the luxury of making consumers download and re-flash them)
- Software and operating systems that just get bigger and bigger and redesigned to make them seem new but only confuse existing users. They still aren't any easier to use, especially to the general public
- DVDs that hold your player hostage so they can play commercials! (not a quality issue but annoying nonetheless)

I voted absolutely.

i voted perhaps, but with a little more thought I'm starting to change my mind....
Just recently I've had:
- My Seagate HDD root itself completely (it wouldn't even spin. 80 gigs of data gone. GG seagate)
- The screen on my mobile (aka "cell") phone goes all faded, aparrently I can get it fixed for free, but it shouldn't do that in the first place........
- My diskman failed several months ago - the headphone jack decided it would be nice not to spit out any sound.
- God only knows how many HP graphics calculators I've had to have replaced under warranty
- Ohh yeah, and some of you may remember when I went for my upgrade last year? Well that was because the motherboard crapped itself and refused to boot.

Yeah, things definately are getting crappier.