Comment by MonkeyClub

> Optimization should be treated as competitive advantage

That's just so true!

The right optimizations at the right moment can have a huge boost for both the product and the company.

However the old tenet regarding premature optimization has been cargo-culted and expanded to encompass any optimization, and the higher-ups would rather have ICs churn out new features instead, shifting the cost of the bloat to the customer by insisting on more and bigger machines.

It's good for the economy, surely, but it's bad for both the users and the eventual maintainers of the piles of crap that end up getting produced.