[Ygg2]

> In summary: our modern computer's sheer power are camouflaging poor software performance

I somewhat disagree. Features sell the product, not performance[1], and for most of the software development you could count on the rising CPU tide to lift all poorly performing apps. But now the tides have turned to drought and optimizing makes a hell of a lot of sense.

[1] They are more of a negative sell and relative to other feature parity products. No one left Adobe Photoshop for Paint, no matter how much faster Paint was. But you could if feature parity is closer, e.g. Affine vs Photoshop.*

[rouxz]

performance is a feature.

[Ygg2]

Yes, but more in a QoL way. I say negative as in - if you don't have it you lose a customer, rather than if you have it, you gain a customer.

If performance is a feature, then it's not an important feature. Otherwise, people would use Paint, for everything.

Or put it another way, you want to do X1 task. It's editing a picture to remove some blemishes from skin. You could use a console, to edit individuals pixels, but it would take months/year to finish the task if you are making changes blindly, then checking. It could take several days if you are doing it with Paint. Or you could do it with Photoshop in a few minutes. What difference does a few ms make if you lose hours?

Now this is only task X1 which is edit blemishes, now you do this for every conceivable task and do an average. What percent of that task are ms loses?

[j1elo]

> if you don't have it you lose a customer, rather than if you have it, you gain a customer

I completely agree with that take. That's exactly the reason why, for example, whenever I'm about to do some "Real Work" with my computer (read: heavyweight stuff), all Electron apps are the first to go away.

My work uses Slack for communications, and it is fine sitting there for the most part, but I close it when doing some demanding tasks because it takes an unreasonable amount of resources for what it is, a glorified chat client.

[theo0833]

I use slack (and spotify) exclusively in the browser because I need a browser open anyway. Never met anything that required the desktop client.

[dinkumthinkum]

Well, I think you are missing a subtle issue. They may not switch but they might pay more if it’s faster. They also might not switch to paint but if photoshop performed terribly they may switch to a dozen different tools for different purposes. This kind of thing already happens.