DISQUS

vmlemon · 9 months ago

I'm glad that I'm not the only one annoyed with this trend. It's a shame that we have hardware that's more powerful than what were considered at one time to be supercomputers, yet are running software that effectively moots any potential performance increases.

If you wanted to see "fast", you could always try Mac OS 8 or 9 under an emulator, although as far as software goes, they're no longer considered capable or suitable for modern computing requirements...

Richard Cunningham · 9 months ago

Well in certain respects computers are not really getting faster.

The improvements in single-thread performance of CPUs has slowed down a lot over the last few years as AMD and Intel have started giving us more cores instead of more Gigahertz. Most programs don't seem to use the other cores well, if it all.

A lot of people are going to be hit by the 4GB limit in various ways. Many machines still come with 32bit OSes for example, and 32bit windows programs can only access 2GB of RAM per program regardless of the OS.

The seek time on hard disks is still about 10ms the same as it has been for years - though SSDs are/will massively improve on that. Most programs startups require a lot of random access. Also when you run out of memory the disk gets hit for virtual memory which is again lots of random access.

Scott Pantall · 9 months ago

It's easier to come up with ideas for software first. - How many times have you had a "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" happen 5 years after you asked it because the hardware finally caught up to your ideas?

People get messy when they have a lots of resources. - Who is more thrifty with their money, a person with $50 in their bank account or a person with $5000? A developer with 16MB of RAM available or a developer with 1GB of RAM available?

I do share your frustrations though. I don't expect any more out of my email, music playing or document editing programs now than I expected 5-10 years ago. The new versions of these older programs should be faster, sleeker and lighter than the old programs, but it seems like it's just the exact opposite!

Mike Schultz · 9 months ago

I'm completely on board with this post Louis.

I'm surprised software companies haven't caught onto this -- I worked with a company several years back in the educational software space, where the founders were educators themselves, frustrated with the feature bloat of the primary tools in their space. It was so refreshing when they explained they were launching a new solution that was "Simple by Design" because they realized teachers only ever used 10% of a software program's functionality at most (and I'd say this applies to nearly all software users).

So many features are added simply to sell new versions... yet they add complexity and detract from the core experience the software was built for. Why is it such a novel concept to cut all the extra features, and focus on making a simpler, easier, faster and better experience for the core functionality of software that the users REALLY need? Perhaps just sell an expanded feature set as an add on for power users. Big software companies should take their queue from the grounded "Simple by Desing" approach of www.Digication.com -- perhaps sell less upgrades, but earn loyalty for life.