Science & Tech Quote by Craig Bruce

A groan disguised as a one-liner: the computer age’s perennial disappointment that raw power keeps arriving, and our ability to squander it keeps pace. Craig Bruce’s quote works because it flips a tech industry sales pitch on its head. Hardware is the easy hero in the story we like to tell: more cores, more memory, higher benchmarks. Software is supposed to be the invisible magician that turns that power into usefulness. Bruce gives software the villain role, and the bite lands because it’s familiar to anyone who’s watched a new laptop choke on bloated startup apps.

The specific intent is less “software is bad” than “software is where complexity hides.” Hardware improves along relatively legible lines: faster chips, better buses, broader bandwidth. Software, by contrast, accumulates. Features stack. Dependencies multiply. Abstractions pile up until the machine is spending cycles on bookkeeping, telemetry, UI gloss, and compatibility promises instead of the job you thought you bought it for. That’s the subtext: progress doesn’t just add capability; it adds overhead, and overhead is political. Someone, somewhere, decided the extra layer was worth it.

Context matters: Bruce is writing from the late-20th-century onward, when Moore’s Law made performance cheap and the software industry learned it could trade efficiency for speed-to-market, richer interfaces, and relentless updates. The joke is also an accusation: “fast” isn’t a property of the device alone, it’s an outcome of discipline. Hardware can be purchased. Restraint has to be engineered.