Of course building great software is hard. So is building great buildings, or designing great planes, or producing great, internationally sold cereal.

The commitee factor is a problem in anything provided internationally to millions of users, as well as in anything sold for hundreed thousands of dollars to single customers.

I don't think software is inherently more difficult than other products with comparable scope and scale. If anything, in software it's easier to develop and provide a product with big scope or big scale than in most other fields. In software you can often achieve quality and scale at the same time with a team smaller than the one of your local hardware shop.

But I agree with the author that in software, like in some other fields, a lot of the incentives are not aligned to create great software.