What he said was correct though, especially at that time. It still very arguable today.

So his argument is basically boils down to better hardware is covering for software ? Why should that matter anyways if we have entire industries dedicated to making better hardware

First of all, the age of exponential increase in power in hardware (Moores law) might be close to end. There are physical barriers we are close to hit. That means in the future new hardware could be not too much better than the one before.

Secondly, if you look into it you learn that also the complexity of hardware is increasing. Blow himself has the example of the thing the later Intel engineer said, that back then they had a phase of knowledge loss. This back then was overcome by new companies, including Intel. But these days the bugs in silicon are increasing rapidly. Operating systems like Linux load a bunch of firmware and fixes to cover for faults in silicon. So hardware has potentially the same problems as software.

Wait, who was the smart guy giving this man a microphone again

So ? Even if we are hitting closer to the limit of Moore's Law, we can still make more specialized hardware to increase performance and if there's bug in the silicon then let the hardware guys do a respin of the silicon as well. I don't see the big deal and neither do the rest of the digital industry as well. If nearly everyone are taking for granted superior hardware then let them since thousands of engineers are obviously getting paid to do this ... 

If 'maintenance' ever becomes the ultimate problem like Jonathon is implying then just open source both the software and the hardware designs and let the community just take care of it from then on to see if they can do a better job ...

Software is definitely important but I doubt civilization will collapse as we're in the golden age of information where archiving and documentation has more value than ever before so many industries are taking more steps to value data ... 

Didn't it end many years ago already? On the CPU side there has been stagnation for a long time.

Stuff like this doesn't end like it's hitting a brick wall, the growth starts to slow down. It may well be that this has already started, yes.

Mainly to try and sell you pointless shit.  Is that progress?  Thank the heavens for ad block.  I don't know how the average user surfs the web without one.

It isn't about Sony impending doom so I'm not interested. We have had prophets of civilization doom for way longer and always wrong

Cassandra was right.