I struggled to name a single piece of non-technical software that has significantly improved in terms of user experience. I've seen better programs replace worse ones (e.g. Discord replacing Skype), but it seems like the general trend is for good software to be ruined, rather than good software becoming better.
Is there anything relatively popular I can point to that bucks this trend?
MS loves to redesign their UI, but does it half-heartedly. There are dialogs that have had things moved to the ribbon or sidebar or property panel, but only some fields, so the sidebar contents are incomplete and you still have to find where they "hid your cheese."
For simple tasks like writing a memo, it's fine.
But as soon as the task is non-trivial (like changing default styles in word, or making a scatter plot line graph with column a as the y axis), office is a terrible user experience for new users, and guaranteed frustration from previously-proficient prior users. It's click-something-shit-not-that-undo whack-a-mole.
Same with Google Chrome (I am using v43 whenever possible) and pretty much all the software.
This is a subjective standard which means nothing. For example browser access to the Camera may be unwanted by many, but at the same time has enabled a whole range of video-chat, barcode-scanning, and translation Web apps.
If the definition of "better" is only "I like Everything" then clearly nothing qualifies.
There have been lots and lots of great new features added to browser engines (html, css, js) over the past 10 years. Stuff that has rendered IE (which had 90+% market share) obsolete in less than a decade.
If you want an example of apps getting better look no further than the browser.
Having said that, Google is starting to add more ads, which degrades the experience somewhat and I guess proves your friends' point.
I think they figured that they locked in people to their services and ecosystem, and now's the time to cash in on that and stock up on cash capital.
but everything else seems to be going down the drain of bloat and slowness
-- oops i notice now that you said non-technical stuff
Honestly? Hard to even think of any - maybe Chrome is faster?. Everything seems a worse , huge-padding, mobile-lookalike travesty of what we had 10 years ago. My daily desktop apps are purposely downgraded to old versions: Office 2007, photoshop CS5, the old windows Photos App (because the windows 10 one crashes!), an old PDF reader, old reddit, VLC and others. I wish i could also downgrade skype or adsense reports, or the bluehost.com control panel, or imgur.com, or the vodafone f*ckin payment page, or paypal all of which waste more of my time than they did before.
It's sad really, and should be alaming , but who cares when everyone is sleeping upon piles of cash
It seems most people here look at a short period of history: they take some crappy software, like modern VS or Office and point that it improved from the initial very crappy version to a less crappy one. Hurray, progress!
What they don't take into account is how much crappier the whole "modern" range of product versions is compared to the original.
I mean how many of your friends could live without their phones?
Linux and BSDs have gotten significantly better and with better hardware support.
In general, if I had a choice between today's software and the software of 15 years ago, running on today's hardware, I'd choose the software of 15 years ago in a heartbeat.
