Louis CK has a fantastic rant about people complaining about technology being too slow (and technology, in general). It helped to put my own rage in perspective. I find myself getting less pissed at technology since watching it, and I kind of hope that lasts.
I love Louis CK as much as the next guy, but he's not a technologist, and his perspective is not helpful to us in this context. In life, sure - have patience. Keep it in perspective. Appreciate what you have, and don't rage against things you can't change.
This rant is not about life, though, it is about what makes for good and bad software. Which happens to be what we do for a living. In the grand scheme of things, we're all dead, and software doesn't matter. While we're here, though, it's not a bad thing to get bent out of shape about the things that bug us about it. It's our job to make this little area of the universe better. I think taking that seriously is a good thing.
Upvoted, because that was well said, and because I'll fully admit that CK's rant is not quite a proper response to the OP.
But I do think that the original rant was clearly someone who let his rage batter the rational part of his brain into a pulp. He mentions things like that the iPhone experience is now what constitutes "minimally usable". Except that no PC (mac or otherwise) comes close to that level of experience and people are still using/buying them, so clearly he has a different definition of minimally usable than a sane person. He's also so annoyed at having to wait that he proposes worse solutions than the wait itself (a fake UI, that still logs actions; I foresee way more frustration from that than having to look at a splash image).
Yeah, there's a lot of room to improve load times, and a well reasoned blog post on that would have been great. But when someone is ballistic to the point that they can't think straight anymore - I think a little comedic appeal to perspective isn't entirely out of line.
I think that's a good attitude in general. That said, it doesn't apply to the creators themselves. I think everyone is happy that somebody took the time to obsess over speed and accuracy when making Google search, or the countless minutiae that make the iPhone's UI slick, leaving the general public to mostly just sit back and enjoy the awesomeness.
Ha, this is exactly what I came in to post. I understand that pursuit of perfection is what drives the industry to become better, but at the same time I have a hard time not laughing at the someone raging about a load-time measured in seconds that will be seen, what, once a day? Once a week? Given that the budget for any software is finite, I can't work up any fury that they didn't shave seconds off a once-off operation instead of dumping it into new features, or performance on longer-running or more-often-used functionality.
That was my first thought. Or people complaining about air travel - "when they are in a chair flying 500 mph 7 miles up!"
I find it hard to get worked up about a program that you are going to use for the next 8 hours taking 30 seconds to start. Though I do get annoyed waiting for STS (SpringSource's Eclipse) to start up.
One thing that would be very helpful for these plugin based program would be for them to be configured with the minimum to start with. It takes forever for Eclipse to start up because it's initializing a dozen plugins/services that I don't care about. And it's not always easy to turn them off.
It only makes sense to complain about any gap between potential and actual performance, though, because that's how things progress.
It's pretty amazing to fly across the country with only ~8 hours of time spent in transit. However, just because that's amazing doesn't make it wrong to complain about one of those hours being spent on completely unnecessary security theater. It could easily be 7 instead of 8, and that's an hour that everybody's wasting. Yes, 8 is still amazing, but 7 would be better.
Same thing with software. It's amazing that we can do this stuff at all, let alone as quickly as we do. Being able to start something as powerful as Photoshop in an hour would still be fantastic. But when the capability exists to make it start in five seconds instead, it's still reasonable to complain about the gap.
To look at it another way, when you're waiting around because necessary work is being done, that's reasonable. But when you're waiting around for the sole reason that somebody decided his time is more important than your time, that's rightly frustrating.
(NSFW)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grxL5umOE6g&feature=relat...