Yeah. You have seen a few things in the last 9 years:
1. Libraries that solve "most" problems, even the flashy, "ooh, lets make pretty graphics no one has seen before", stuff.
2. Better development systems, so you can reuse code easier, and understand how it connects to other things.
3. The realization that just because you remove dependencies doesn't mean your product won't have as many, or more, crash prone bugs as the next guy, and its actually *easier* to fix those, if you have a clear concept of what goes in, and comes out, of the module, as apposed to rolling you own, where you may miss something "hugely" critical.
And that is just in the software end of things. To some extent, this can work with business models too, though, the point of the article is still, somewhat, true there. Just not for the reason imagined. You tend to get one of three sorts of companies - 1. Those that see support as an expense to be minimized, run scripted support, and try to get you to give up, before solving the problem, since solving it costs time, which costs them money, 2. Those that are just not competent at fixing your problem at all (AOL for the Apple II, back when you had to use dialup clients is a good example. You sent an email, and a) the reply email auto-deleted, so you had no way to talk to the original responder, and b) every question they asked you ignored what you where talking about, and/or assumed you where connecting from a PC, so could give them bloody direct information about what the address and folder was the file you where trying to download was in, something the Apple version didn't let you see. Its was simply not possible to *get* support, unless you where on a PC from them.), 3. Those willing to spend the time to fix an issue, even though fixing it costs them money (More common from, say.. a smaller ISP, than from the guy selling you a $300 piece of software).
Luckily, unless the problem is something that keeps you from getting online at all, you *may* be able to find a forum some place where people talked about the problem and how to fix it now. lol
But, yeah. The article was a bit over the top, and I couldn't help note it using an MS product as an example... Today I doubt Excel is any less intergrated with external junk than anything else they make, and nothing they ever made was ever what I would call.. stable, even when they tried to avoid those dependencies, and recode stuff every time for each application.
