Youtube, twitter, and reddit have obviously been in the news a lot recently, but every day business applications also seem to just keep getting worse. Got new PCs at work which means version updates, and pretty much everything we use (autocad, adobe acrobat, and ms office, mainly) all seem to run much slower, despite the computers having substantially higher specs. Love that I can’t use any old versions or alternatives because they refuse to grant me admin access.
I love capitalist innovation! Why make things better when you could just make them worse and charge more?
I was just talking about this with some of my CS meet-up people in our virtual hangout. The group is most 25-45 in age from all sorts of backgrounds and stuff, and we all agree it’s bonkers pretty much every program are so bogged down with features and functions that are used by like .0001% user-base but add an 100X in load times and performance costs.
Not only are these programs full of bloat, I can only imagine the code that makes these things are just full of hacks and “fixes” that need to be reworked from the ground up. I think the craft of building software has been negatively impacted by the whole “get it done” mindset of startups rather than “get it right” of yesteryear.
I’ve heard people suggest that the craft of software development has been hobbled by Moore’s Law. The available computing power has increased so rapidly that there has never been pressure on devs to produce clean, elegant, efficient software. Instead they just produce endless spaghetti code and the problems and inefficiencies are hidden by the available compute power.
It’s cheaper for companies to force end users to upgrade their hardware, than it is for the software companies to hire more people to optimise software