The phrase a simple matter of software has been in common use within the software industry since at least the early 1980s
It is often used as an ironic comment on both the growing importance of software in all human activity and the real difficulty we have in creating good quality software.
However, it is also used without irony to indicate that straightforward software development is all that is required to resolve some issue. This usage is often invoked when the speaker wants to contrast the implied ease of software changes with the suggested greater difficulty of making a hardware change or a change to an industry standard. This non-ironic usage is more often invoked by senior management and hardware engineers, than it is by software engineers.
Famous quotes containing the words simple and/or matter:
“Each man’s private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess ...”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)