I think this is reflective of a different adaptive process. Software in the medical industry has been selected for, among others criteria, compliance with specifications—medical (e.g. specified tolerance for a blood pressure monitor), regulatory (e.g. HIPAA compliance), and procedural (e.g. coding that matches expectations of several different insurance systems). These selective pressures are driven by both rules that medical institutions have to follow and the market dynamics of sales in the medical industry, which involve large and conservative institutions making large purchasing decisions.
Software in other markets, like social networking or computer games, evolved in an environment with very different selective pressures. This kind of software is much more mutative, and for good reason: it's very unlikely that someone will die because of a bug introduced in a website-wide redesign or a glitch in a patch to a computer game.
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Software in other markets, like social networking or computer games, evolved in an environment with very different selective pressures. This kind of software is much more mutative, and for good reason: it's very unlikely that someone will die because of a bug introduced in a website-wide redesign or a glitch in a patch to a computer game.