[jonhohle]

Has document writing or spreadsheet creation changed much since the 90s? Word and Excel 6 were significantly faster than current versions and were running on PCs with 8 or 16MB of RAM and, at least for my use cases, did effectively the same job they do today. In some cases they did it better.

How has document creation changed in two decades that justifies two orders of magnitude more RAM and CPU performance, 10x power draw, etc.?

If your house was built with 100x the resources and consumed that much more power, and it took longer to turn on the lights or cook a meal would it be justified because the building process was easier and you could add new light fixtures more easily? That would be lunacy, but for some reason we think it’s OK in software to avoid the craftsmanship the profession demands while treat users like fools who should just accept that computers are faster so their apps should be slower. It’s garbage reasoning. The ergonomics of developers should always come second to providing the best for customers.

[philipkglass]

It's hard to stay in business offering a product that touts "fewer features, but smaller memory footprint and snappier UI response" vs. its competitors. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptional. That's why organizations pay for big, slow Slack instead of using fast, free, svelte IRC clients.

[jonhohle]

In other industries these are things that become commodities. They aren't thrown out and replaced with something new, the business move into a different phase (or shed that business to someone else willing to take the role).

[selectodude]

>10x power draw

I can run xlookup functions on a 1000 row excel spreadsheet on my cell phone.

[jonhohle]

Amazing, isn’t it? Yet somehow a 100w i9 is doing things at nearly the same perceived speed as a 10w Pentium.