Evil enters the world "because the people who do give a crap don’t have the power to do something about it."
Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
21–30 of 280 posts
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#22The 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…
That is only partially true. Office 2000 and 2003 were great releases, the main applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook) were fast and stable as long as you weren't running some weird corporate domain deployment.
Earlier and later versions were worse, and Outlook was horrible if you were stuck on a domain.
Excel always had issues if you were doing something stupid like using it as a database and all of the apps had issues if you were being stupid with OLE via copy/paste or were using Internet Explorer.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#23I 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…
Was it the German company SAP?
How did the end-users even find your software especially when the IT folks hated it?
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#24At my previous job I was given permission to fully rewrite the call centre script/tooling used by sales agents. I also came from that team, and took a quick detour to the data team before finally landing in a development role. Giving me a full understanding of not only the agents needs and wants, but the limits on data being fed into this system.
The resulting page loaded 10 times faster than what it replaced, which was a 'no code' option that the sales director set up. My solution was built with HTML/CSS/JS/PHP and contained authentication, accessibility, and a toolbox of modules for specific tasks that loaded only when needed (and still lightning fast). Scoring a perfect 100% in every test I threw at it.
The positive result of this change was immediately apparent. Not only to the agents and managers, but to the data team. The speed resulted in a full 130% increase in sales, across all agents.
Why? Well, the old script took time to download Google Fonts and a boatload of other garbage which put the page load at 2+seconds. This was dead air piled on-top of the delay caused by the auto-dialer. Meaning everyone we called had 3+ seconds of nobody saying anything. When this was cut to 1 second, there wasn't a telltale delay to work around in the sales process.
So at least in this case, it took the sales director to care enough, not the dev.
I built the entire thing in 3 days with zero assistance.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#25I 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?
I'm sure they had lots of reasons.
I got to ghost on a sales call once with one of our customers (I was a lead developer at the time).
From what I could tell their IT people didn't like our software because:
- They were already in the middle of a multi-year roll-out of SAP, integrating our software was a wrinkle in a plan they'd been working on for a long time
- Nobody got fired for choosing SAP, some saw choosing software from a small shop they'd never heard of was risky
- Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they!
- Support: they knew how to handle issues with SAP, user accounts, authentication, authorization, etc; integrating another piece in the mix across the entire company would be a whole project
It was a fun call to sit in on.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#26I 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.
I assume that they were having to do end-user support. I was working in IT at that time and recognise that reaction from IT.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#27> 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.
I can't avoid slow software because older, less bloated versions of mandatory tools in my industry (translation) are sunset with no recourse, and incompatible file changes mean I have to upgrade.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#28The 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…
When people say 20-30 years ago they actually mean 40-50 years ago, because it's the same people that have been saying the same thing for 20 years, picturing in their head the handcrafted assembly QuickDraw routines.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#29because normal people r dumb and they will always think there poor hardware is not enough to run bloated software slows so buy more whole android phone market is like this.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#30The author is my consciousness personified trying to slap me into learning tla+