After a threshold the business value drops off substantially. How often does a consumer pick between competitors and choose based on speed? I would assume that's vastly in the minority.
You see some shakeups here and there. A large push to a new browser once a decade, etc. but features are king most of the time.
> After a threshold the business value drops off substantially.
Sure, but I don't see any reason better tools couldn't get us closer. Instead of starting out with languages and tools that will almost guarantee slow software, maybe we work on designing languages that provide productivity while at the same time encouraging leaner software.
I don't disagree that overall the environment software is developed in doesn't encourage lean software. But I do think it's worthwhile to see if there are ways to improve the situation.
Also, faster software can often provide opportunities for new features that weren't possible before. For example, something that used to be a batch or background process can now become a real-time feature. That is something that customers likely would find useful.
> Instead of starting out with languages and tools that will almost guarantee slow software, maybe we work on designing languages that provide productivity while at the same time encouraging leaner software.
The key point I'm making is that you need to consider the whole system/environment; developers aren't choosing "slow languages" because they simply don't care about performance, they are choosing those languages because they are more productive in other dimensions, and the return on that productivity gain exceeds the return on optimizing for more speed.
> Also, faster software can often provide opportunities for new features that weren't possible before.
Absolutely -- we do see performance improvements happen, when they give users something that they actually value; for example the reason IntelliJ triumphed over Eclipse was by doing more sophisticated compiling/parsing in real-time, which was only made possible by significant performance optimizations.
You see some shakeups here and there. A large push to a new browser once a decade, etc. but features are king most of the time.