[keldaris]

> Those same users are probably benefitting from the other thing I did that delivered value to my company. It has value for the company because it has value, directly or indirectly, for the customer. Eventually, it'll sort itself out with competition.

This kind of oversimplified faith in the idealized notion of the free market completely ignores the myriad of externalities that systematically distort software competition. General arguments aside, it suffices to go through almost any set of software niches to note that the dominant products in most of them are dominant for reasons that have nothing whatsoever (and are frequently inversely correlated with) any reasonable sense of technical merit or even economic value produced (for the users) in the present (though many of them were once upon a time arguably the best in their respective niche).

> Ultimately, my work is dictated by what the customers whine about. If they make more noise over missing feature X than slow feature Y, X gets my time.

Non-technical users rarely articulate performance-related concerns, but that doesn't mean they don't have them. In my experience, if you have prolonged free form conversations with them, they will often voice impressions of the software in question getting slower and less reliable overall, whereas targeted questionnaires and focus groups will tend to laser in on specific features simply because those are much easier to articulate. Also, bad software is so common by now that some people can't even imagine that there isn't actually any sane technical reason for, say, Photoshop to take almost 10 seconds to open a simple image file. That doesn't mean you're not wasting their time, money and energy.