Comment by eloisant
4 years ago
More generally, in my experience performance isn't looked at because it's "good enough" from a product point of view.
"Yes it's kinda slow, but not enough so customers leave so who cares." Performance only becomes a priority when it's so bad customers complain loudly about it and churn because of it.
There’s a bit of incentive misalignment when commercial software performance is concerned. If we presume customers with tighter budgets tend to be more vocal and require more support, and customers on slower machines are often customers on tighter budgets, the business as a whole might actually not mind those customers leaving as it’d require less support resources spent on customers who are more difficult to upsell to.
Meanwhile, the majority of customers with faster machines are not sensitive enough to feel or bother about the avoidable lag.
Though we're now in a situation where lots of software (see: Word and Excel) is painfully slow even on high-end desktop hardware.
That is probably why they have this law called wirths law about the wintel ecosystem. What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.
Or Gates's law "The speed of software halves every 18 months"
There's also sometimes the incentive to slow things down because if it is too fast, the client will perceive that he paid too much money for an operation that takes no time, i.e. it doesn't exists seems unimportant.
It would be a shame for a truly artistically designed busy-wheel if it didn't get turn once or twice, regardless of the time it was actually needed!