Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay.
There may be an interesting economic lesson here: it really is not that easy to externalize costs. It surely can be done (air pollution), but it requires some special circumstances for those costs not to be internalized in a different form. (These special circumstances might include information asymmetries, harm to a public good, enjoyed by people other than a firm's own customers, etc.--themselves classic risk factors for market failure.)
By the same token, there probably are some truly externalized costs in this example, but I would expect them to be very minor and indirect. For example, most people probably do not pay the 'true' cost of their electricity. So to the extent electron wastes power, some of the cost will be internalized in the form of user dissatisfaction. But some will also be externalized either because the user doesn't know about the extra power consumption, or because the user herself doesn't fully internalize the costs of her power consumption and therefore doesn't care as much as she might if all costs were properly internalized.
> Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay.
Precisely. I don't use Slack in part because its desktop application is irrationally bloated for its use-case. Although I have other reasons as well, they are enduring a cost--a small one to be sure, but presumably non-trivial in aggregate--in people refusing to use their service in part because their desktop application is poor.
But I do agree with the general emotion underlying the frustration of "externalities" here. As someone who advocates for high-performance and efficient web applications, I have toyed with the question of whether developers should confront the morality of wasting energy by having selected poor/low-performance platforms. Put in a somewhat comedic tone: low-performance software contributes to climate change.
The problem is that despite how good it feels, individuals simply optimizing their individual activity does not scale to the societal scope. Post-agrarian humans literally behave and think via shared infrastructure. The only way individuals can make lasting improvements to society is to improve the infrastructure.
Does it? Or maybe those individual pop up and do their progressive thing only when existing infrastructure and technological landscape lets them do that?
Why they haven't made Slack a web based chat app like Discord or Wire or even Skype is beyond me. I don't even use their native apps, just open a tab in my browser and run the corresponding web app.
"Along with the features available in your browser, the app loads your conversations more quickly, gives you more control over notifications, and has better support for multiple teams."[1]
Also, the app gets its own entry in the task switcher.
The real trick is whether or not users care about:
A) This works on all of the platforms that we use
vs
B) Performance could be better on my computer
It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...which is almost entirely because SSD's make them so much less noticeable if you start dipping into swap unless you're really working out your machine.
For most users, just knowing it will work on their machine is a bigger influence in using the product...and therefore a greater influence on business...than the performance of that system. It's especially true with a chat system where the most important feature is that everybody on the team can get access.
> It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...
Really???
Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have. Don't try running on battery saving mode, seriously.
I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can't watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions.
----
Fun Anecdote: I had to trial an entreprisey SaaS solution not long ago. A coworker gave me the name and I opened the site on my laptop (on the move outside of work, just taking a quick look).
Their site froze my firefox for 30 seconds because these idiots put a high quality full screen video of a surfer in the background of the main page. Looks cool, doesn't it? https://www.wavefront.com/
Couldn't see the site. Had to be at work to read it, on my top end workstation, the video played smoothly there. Needless to say, didn't take the product seriously.
> I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded,
5+ years ago is that LOOOOOONG time that OP was talking about. It's also unfair to compare technical capabilities of old hardware for many reasons. I think the point was that, new hardware, _while its new_, is becoming more and more capable. Any new laptop today, even budget ones, can handle YouTube videos in HD. The problem is that HD today won't be the same HD that exists in 5 years (i.e., 4k), and it's sensible that a budget laptop today will struggle with the 8k technology that comes out 5 years from now. This is an old problem (pun intended) and should not be surprising.
> Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have.
Selection bias. Programmers who compile code, run VMs or containers, and process tons of data, are not the average consumer laptop use case and have much stricter requirements. Many people are sitting in Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, or Google Docs for most of their day-- and likely inside of Chrome.
Where are the "Chrome is Flash for the desktop" posts?
The idea that Electron is any different of a user experience for the vast majority of users seems skewed to developer usage, to me.
I don't know, 5+ years isn't that old anymore for a computer. Like, 5 years ago I was running... a core i7 with 4GB of ram. And now I'm running... a core i7 with 16GB of ram. The only things in computers that have really gotten significantly faster are SSDs and GPUs
It takes a surprising amount of power to decode. The cheap CPU from netbooks have been struggling for a decade, especially in battery power saving mode.
Lately, they get hardware acceleration just for that. Special CPU instructions and drivers just to achieve that decently.
For Youtube in particular, they're sending VP9+opus where the browser supports it, without considering hardware acceleration. The rather anaemic Atom chips might have H264 decoding on-chip, but only Kabylake has VP9.
Different people have vastly different use cases. I haven't experienced a performance issue with desktop Slack or any other (non-game) application for many years. Sure, if I look at how much RAM Slack is using I'd probably conclude that it's more than it needs to be, but I haven't had an issue with RAM usage for, gee, probably ten years.
As for battery, again, my laptop battery has been little more than a UPS for at least five years.
It's mostly CPU performances I experience. Rendering any video, gif, website takes sizeable CPU power (for a cheap CPU in power saving mode).
Never had issue with RAM. I can remember a few friends who bought netbooks with 2GB memory some years ago, they quickly realized that they simply cannot run their development environment in that. (I'm talking swap death where a click that should take 1 second to act takes 1 entire minute).
Right now I'm using a backup laptop with Intel Celeron. It runs most apps fine. Web sites like Hacker News come up easily and snappily. The CPU fan kicks in when I watch a high-quality movie. It also kicks in on small, web apps. Kicks in big time on Youtube and Facebook. Everything on those is sluggish compared to my native apps. Even if non-technical, I'd know stuff was about to slow down when I go into my browser.
Just bad tools leading to waste users notice. Best to avoid them if possible. Not always possible...
> I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can't watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions.
Are they all netbooks? Because those were crap the day they came out and even more crap 5 years later. You can find terrible discount desktop machines that can't handle anything just as easy as you can find terrible laptops.
My laptop is 5 years old and the only time I feel a lack of performance is when the Swift compiler fires up. Your example link came up right away (OK it burns away 30% of a core, but I got 4 of those).
They are not crap by any standard, they are simply low spec.
A core i3/i5 starts at 150$, most devices don't have these expensive CPU.
Even a 1000$ macbook from 5 years ago would have one of the first i3/i5. It would struggle to read 1080p video, unless plugged to a wall plug with the span spinning seriously.
> It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems.
This annoys me a lot, for one of two reasons. Either:
1. Some developers have no idea what performance means -- it's crazy that I have time to notice a spinner when a glorified IRC client starts up or switches tabs, let alone have time to watch it for tens of seconds.
or:
2. If these developers are claiming they have no performance problems, clearly the laptops that can handle modern applications are being hoarded, and I have no way to obtain one of these magical machines. All I can get are recent i7 processors.
On point 1: Also there's still the effect where your app does the same thing a native app would do in an equally reasonable time but uses twice as much power to do it.
>It's especially true with a chat system where the most important feature is that everybody on the team can get access.
That's a complete other story... All that big open source movement for decades and in 2017 we are still depending on proprietary systems to provide a chat(!) for a company.
Yep, and when the government doesn't properly tax those harm-to-public-good things like air pollution to balance the incentives and make it cheaper to do "the right thing" and pollute less, companies (which are made of real people and are not just unthinking machines) will do whatever they can to maximize profits. This is why it's so important to e.g. Increase the price of water to reflect the true cost in the Central Valley of CA instead of letting tons of farmers grow water-intensive crops in open-air, wasting tons of water just because it's cheap (then they complain about "is GROWING FOOD a waste of water?!?", completely un-ironically). Many businesses subsidize their operations using government funding, yet again ironically most of the rich white men running them are staunch opponents of public assistance programs despite owing most of their wealth to similar mechanisms, typically in conjunction with massive tax avoidance.
Pretty funny that the only reply here is 'found the Marxist' (maybe it was supposed to be a joke?) when, in reality, all you're suggesting is that the government set the conditions for the proper functioning of the market, which is an idea straight our of Hayek.
I don't understand. The cost is mostly externalized into, quite literally, massively distributed increased electricity consumption. That an individual's power bill may be subsidized only emphasizes that problem.
It sounds like we agree. To the extent we're just talking about electricity costs, then it's true that easily written, but inefficient code may indeed externalize these costs to the extent that users are unaware of the added power consumption, or that the user herself does not pay the full cost of that electricity.
But these electricity costs struck me as only a small part of the broader point I was responding to, which is what I framed the point the way I did.
I contend that squandering the work and infrastructure involved in converting natural resources into electricity is the main problem with modern consumer software development. Any user's (lack of) perception of waste is irrelevant. The scope of the problem is not any individual literally paying a couple dollars more on their electric bill, but rather it's that gigawatt hours are literally being burned away because software developers who know their code will be running on machines the world over can't be assed to spend a little more time learning to practice their craft correctly.
There is no broader point than converting natural resources into societal infrastructure. Be a responsible member of society. Don't obstinately ship wasteful code. I understand if you legitimately don't know any better, but if you're part of the community that's constantly writing blog posts about computers being so fast that its OK to burn the end users' CPU and storage just so you don't have to spend a couple more minutes thinking about what you're doing, you're adding harm to the world.
Again. I think we agree. You're just making a different point than the one I was making. I was making a technical but hopefully still constructive point about what is an externality and what is not.
You seem more focused on making a case against shipping inefficient code. And you're point is a good one. It's just a little difficult to suss that out since you're framing it as standing in opposition to my related, but very different, observation about externalities.
There may be an interesting economic lesson here: it really is not that easy to externalize costs. It surely can be done (air pollution), but it requires some special circumstances for those costs not to be internalized in a different form. (These special circumstances might include information asymmetries, harm to a public good, enjoyed by people other than a firm's own customers, etc.--themselves classic risk factors for market failure.)
By the same token, there probably are some truly externalized costs in this example, but I would expect them to be very minor and indirect. For example, most people probably do not pay the 'true' cost of their electricity. So to the extent electron wastes power, some of the cost will be internalized in the form of user dissatisfaction. But some will also be externalized either because the user doesn't know about the extra power consumption, or because the user herself doesn't fully internalize the costs of her power consumption and therefore doesn't care as much as she might if all costs were properly internalized.