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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

#11

Post by didgetmaster »

A big part of the problem in my opinion, is that people are generally not interested in investing (money, time, effort) in technology. They focus almost exclusively on products. The short term is always given a much higher priority than long term.

If someone invents a much better way (faster, easier, cheaper) to do some key part of a widely used product (operating system, database, file system, network protocol), they won't get any traction until they have built a competing product with all the bells and whistles around that technology.

That can be a formidable task to a startup founder with limited resources who has to try and compete with products that have huge budgets and decades of development behind them. Investors won't touch it until you have a completed and tested product with many customers already signed up. Customers won't touch it until it is a 'drop-in replacement' for their existing solution which requires resources to finish. Classic catch-22 or chicken-and-egg problem.

You can't just find a way to do something 10x faster and expect others to flock to it.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#12

Post by iveqy »

I think there's actually something in this. That's why I've created my own CRM/ERP system. All page loads that are slower than 100 ms is considered a bug and I'm usually on under 50 ms.

And of course I've a TUI version of it as well, with all data local (and synced to the cloud).

I really hope that once I'm ready to put it out there, I will find the right audience.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#14

Post by raziel2p »

agentultra wrote: post #7

I 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…

> The IT folks at said multinationals hated our software

why?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#15

Post by amalcon »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The 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 a…

> MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you,

It's an old joke at this point that you can tell when a person first became a serious computer user based on how frequently they save their work. My muscle memory for ctrl+s is so ingrained that I type it every minute or two in things like Google Docs that literally ignore it.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#16

Post by capableweb »

zokier wrote: post #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.

Yeah, sometimes there are literally no alternatives or no alternatives "that have it all".

Jira comes to mind as one example, where it seems almost universally hated by developers but loved by others, yet everyone (including others) complain it's slow, but damn if you cannot model near every single process in Jira if you'd like to.

Wordpress is another where performance is atrocious and security is usually lacking, but if you look for a plugin that does X, someone somewhere probably have already coded it for Wordpress.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#18

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

I'm going to pre-emptively link Casey Muratori's Refterm Lecture Part 1[0], because invariably when this topic comes up people are all "but optimization takes time and we gotta push the new features right now or the market will eat us."

Computers are so ludicrously fast these days that in the majority of cases you do not need optimization at all. You do need de-pessimization though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgoetgxecw8

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#19

Post by tgv »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The 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 a…

Well, MS Word 5.1a on a mac ran really fine, as did all the Apple/ClarisWorks software. Word Perfect on a PC ran fine, too. Then came the inevitable bloat. Later versions of MS Word didn't run that smooth anymore, ClarisWorks became unsufferable. WP killed itself.

There's still lean software. Mellel (for macOS, https://www.mellel.com) is a very responsive editor, with a style edit model that's a bit different from Word. But it takes a lot of work to make something increasingly capable and keep performance.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#20

Post by [deleted] »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The 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 a…

[deleted]
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