[diggernet]

I used to need to use a large web app like that at work. You'd get a login page. Submitting your login caused the app to load, which was many MB. Once that was all downloaded, the page would finally display, and you could do what you needed to. (In our case, you usually only needed to look something up quickly and be done, which is a bit different than your case.) But the real kicker is... the company VPN was slow. Really slow. In fact, most of the time, as soon as the app finally loaded, the first thing it did was pop up a dialog telling you your session had expired due to inactivity and send you back to the login page to start over from scratch.

I sure missed the simple, small, usable, multi page site we used before the "upgrade" to the single page app competitor! (On top of that, the old one worked fine on mobile. The new one, not at all.)

[hyperpape]

That's painful. I definitely think that there are cases where enterprise users would be best served by simple server rendered HTML or minimal JS.

Still, I can't help but think that the real low-hanging fruit is the slow VPN. How much time was wasted waiting for the network? So many companies are penny-wise pound-foolish.

[Spivak]

I think you have it backwards here. Most companies are pound wise in the sense that they consider the time cost of employees in a project management setting, but don't account for the small but frequent time wasted waiting on a slow network.

It's not impossible but it's a tough sell arguing for a 50k expenditure for better hardware for the VPN will actually save the company time worth >50k.

[hyperpape]

Hmm, maybe I underestimate the cost of VPN upgrades.

I'd say that there's a point where the overhead of spending money becomes high enough that companies will waste a lot of expensive employee time to avoid requisitioning something.

And although companies track high level time costs in a project management context, I'm not sure whether they're conscious of the way that time use can be driven by bits of waste.

That sorta fits "penny wise, pound foolish", but sorta doesn't.