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:
“If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that—but that isn’t simple.”
—Louis B. Lundborg (1906–1981)
“It’s a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don’t need to have anything else; and if you don’t have it, it doesn’t much matter what else you have.”
—J.M. (James Matthew)