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:
“Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.”
—Anita Brookner (b. 1938)
“No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, “O sea-starved hungry sea.””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)