[peterwwillis]

IANASEOE, YMMV, HBD, ETC. but for us, yes. the site of my company was balls slow yet managed amazing feats of capitalism, mostly due to a faithful userbase in the face of faster and cheaper alternative sites. value won out.

an example: Steam, the game delivery system, takes longer to deliver and properly execute games than it takes to buy one from the store, install it and run it. but you get more value from steam so people sit through hours or nights/days worth of downloading to run its games.

[andreyf]

Good point about Steam. It really does suck balls compared even to the vast majority of web apps. Ditto for iTunes: slow as balls sometimes, but I still use it to buy music sometimes.

Still, a competing product will win both over if it can get sub-100ms response time for all of their UI interactions. Buy and listen to a song? Imagine hearing it instantly after you click "buy & listen".