So, none of the reasons that software is mediocre is that developing, and maintaining, great software is actually hard?

Instead he claims it's all just due to market (lock-in, free) and management (more people) reasons.

That strikes me as being somewhat cynical, but perhaps I'm not reading it right.

Personally I think the bar is pretty high for software, since it's all mainstream now it's hard to get by with under-delivering in terms of features, which makes even "simple" things kind of complicated, which often necessitates at least a slightly larger team than before. Having a larger team I think makes quality harder to achieve due to the "committee-factor".