The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

"The world" runs on _features_ not elegant, fast, or bug free software. To the end user, there is no difference between a lack of a feature, and a bug. Nor is there any meaningful difference between software taking 5 minutes to complete something because of poor performance, compared to the feature not being there and the user having to spend 5 minutes completing the same task manually. It's "slow".

If you keep maximizing value for the end user, then you invariably create slow and buggy software. But also, if you ask the user whether they would want faster and less buggy software in exchange for fewer features, they - surprise - say no. And even more importantly: if you ask the buyer of software, which in the business world is rarely the end user, then they want features even more, and performance and elegance even less. Given the same feature set, a user/buyer would opt for the fastest/least buggy/most elegant software. But if it lacks any features - it loses. The reason to keep software fast and elegant is because it's the most likely path to be able to _keep_ adding features to it as to not be the less feature rich offering. People will describe the fast and elegant solution with great reviews, praising how good it feels to use. Which might lead people to think that it's an important aspect. But in the end - they wouldn't buy it at all if it didn't do what they wanted. They'd go for the slow frustrating buggy mess if it has the critical feature they need.

Agree WRT the tradeoff between features and elegance.

Although, I do wonder if there’s an additional tradeoff here. Existing users, can apparently do what they need to do with the software, because they are already doing it. Adding a new feature might… allow them to get rid of some other software, or do something new (but, that something new must not be so earth shattering, because they didn’t seek out other software to do it, and they were getting by without it). Therefore, I speculate that existing users, if they really were introspective, would ask for those performance improvements first. And maybe a couple little enhancements.

Potential new users on the other hand, either haven’t heard of your software yet, or they need it to do something else before they find it useful. They are the ones that reasonably should be looking for new features.

So, in “features vs performance” decision is also a signal about where the developers’ priorities lay: adding new users or keeping old ones happy. So, it is basically unsurprising that:

* techies tend to prefer the latter—we’ve played this game before, and know we want to be the priority for the bulk of the time using the thing, not just while we’re being acquired.

* buggy slow featureful software dominates the field—this is produced by companies that are prioritizing growth first.

* history is littered with beautiful, elegant software that users miss dearly, but which didn’t catch on broadly enough to sustain the company.

However, the tradeoff is real in both directions; most people spend most of their time as users instead of potential users. I think this is probably a big force behind the general perception that software and computers are incredibly shit nowadays.