Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
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Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#2> I don’t know if there’s anything we can do.
I know something we could do, at least for websites. Google could finally make good on their announcement and make CWV actually have a measurable impact on rankings. I work for affiliates/SEO people. When CWV was announced, suddenly they cared about performance. Then the deadline came and went and Google decided not to make it really count after all, and they stopped caring. You don't have to be better than your competition if you're not extremely slow, because either you're on 1 and you get the user, or you're not, and the user never sees your site (traffic on rank 2 and 3 drops dramatically, and beyond that it's barely noticeable).
If Google decided to punish slow load times, large layout shifts, huge payloads, and tons of JS by downranking the sites, you'd quickly have very fast websites all around.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#3> The more interesting question is “why don’t people avoid slow software.”
Outside of pathological cases, even slow software usually is still lot better than no software and doing things manually, especially when the number of users is >1. I believe that is big reason why people do not avoid slow software.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#4> I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. I know something we could do, at least for websites. Google could finally make good on their announcement and make CWV actually have a measurable impact on rankings. I work for affiliates/SEO people. When CWV was announced, suddenly they cared about performance. Then the deadline came and went and Google decided not to make it really count after all, and they stopped cari…
You would have very fast landing pages, which you still do today. But the issue is SaaS apps are soul crushingly slow, but google does not care about that because google cannot login.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#5I think performance simply just isn't on the radar of a big chunk of devs these days, especially self-taught ones. Front-end wise, what with the trend of using frameworks (react/vue/etc) & a billion lines of javascript downloaded from npm, it'd probably be too much of a task to even begin profiling.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#6> I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. I know something we could do, at least for websites. Google could finally make good on their announcement and make CWV actually have a measurable impact on rankings. I work for affiliates/SEO people. When CWV was announced, suddenly they cared about performance. Then the deadline came and went and Google decided not to make it really count after all, and they stopped cari…
You would have very fast landing pages, which you still do today. But the issue is SaaS apps are soul crushingly slow, but google does not care about that because google cannot login.
But SAAS apps don't get their traffic via Google. Their sales site does, but not the app itself. To get SAAS apps faster, you need upper management to care about the performance of the app, which they also don't. They care about a convoluted web of short-term ladder-climbing moves dictated by multiple layers of the principal agent problem.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#7I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP.
The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify your forms and workflows. It cost millions of dollars and years to roll out SAP at a factory.
The software we were making was faster, could be rolled out in weeks, and was user-extensible.
The IT folks at said multinationals hated our software. It was the end-users that demanded it, and ultimately, won us our contracts again and again.
Performance and reliability matters! It let folks on site get more work done, faster, and with better reporting and insights than they had ever gotten with their bloated, slow, expensive, and difficult-to-use software from more "traditional" vendors.
It was a neat experience.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#8> I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. I know something we could do, at least for websites. Google could finally make good on their announcement and make CWV actually have a measurable impact on rankings. I work for affiliates/SEO people. When CWV was announced, suddenly they cared about performance. Then the deadline came and went and Google decided not to make it really count after all, and they stopped cari…
You would have very fast landing pages, which you still do today. But the issue is SaaS apps are soul crushingly slow, but google does not care about that because google cannot login.
Google gets data from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX, everyone can access aggregated data on Big Query), so they'll even get information on performance from pages they themselves never see, and "the origin" (aka the domain) is the most relevant group for most websites, because they won't have enough traffic on each individual page.
If Google only relied on measuring itself, it would just be a cat and mouse game to identify Google's testers and serve them a stripped down version. But they already have the actual real user data.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#9The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't as snappy as it theoretically could be, that is mostly because the market finds the tradeoff between features and speed. I'd rather have a search take a second or two longer if it is able to handle synonyms and different word forms. VS Code is so much better than Visual Studio from around 2000.
Usually, the truly bloated software (like a lot of edutech) is just because of regulatory capture. Most of edutech isn't judged by the market, but by committees of corrupt idiots, who always exist and for which the open market is the solution for.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#10I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify y…
IT folks hated it? Or maybe just the bigwigs? You don’t say why but guessing because you innovated away their headcount.