31/08/2026
A working application can be pushed aside by a forced update, a discontinued cloud service, a broken API, a new file format, a heavier software stack, or an AI feature nobody asked for. The hardware may still be perfectly capable, the workflow may still be valid, and the user may be completely satisfied—yet the system is effectively declared dead.
That is not progress. It is software-driven obsolescence, and we rarely count its environmental cost.
Software sustainability is often discussed in terms of energy consumption, data-center efficiency, cloud infrastructure, and the growing computational cost of AI. All of these issues matter, but they tend to overshadow a more basic question: how much unnecessary software turnover is created by the w...