[Sebb767]

I guess it's more of a natural selection process - the software house which can deliver a good enough working piece will (nearly) always beat the one which adds another two years of development time (and cost) to make the app a bit snappier. Ask Lotus Notes and Netscape.

I don't want to say that performance does not matter at all - it does - but with hardware being as cheap as it is and developer time and time-to-market being as expensive, optimizing that last 500ms and 200MB out simply is not going to be worth it.

And let's not disregard the expense of performance optimization - you'll not only need a reference to benchmark and test against, but also spend a lot of time debugging and writing very plattform-specific code with tons of edge cases. It's not like saving 2GB of memory comes for free.

[mcguire]

Multiply that 500ms and 200mb by more than a few thousand users and you are talking about real time and money.

Everything seems to have been optimized for the enterprise market.

[Sebb767]

That's why I've mentioned time to market. Take GitHub as an example: It's neither the fastest/most lightweight git hosting page (that would probably be Gogs/Gitea) nor the most feature-rich (GitLab is far more advanced, as far as I can tell). They are where they are because they've made a viable product first. Same with slack: Electron is not a good solution, but it was a desktop app in 5 minutes - can't beat that.

I'm not trying to say performance doesn't matter - I'm using lower-powered devices myself - but development time is also a big factor for b2c.