Forget performance. Let's add another feature!

Sometimes i think I'm a Benjamin Button kind of guy. As I grow older, I tend to do young, stupid things. For example, I have carelessly dumped my old Firefox in favor of a new Chrome browser. Then, I threw away my Palm Centro for an iPhone and reformatted my hard drive after my laptop slugged away for weeks. And as I done all this, I found out there's no turning back; and sometimes you feel you've lived your whole life in ignorance.

Google has marketed its browser as the fastest browser around today. Even if the performance is not as good as they claims, the minimalistic feeling certainly makes you feel this way. Apple didn't have to market anything. The amazing 3D effects in the iPhone's user interface and the smooth application performance market themselves. With current Vista performance I tried linux a few times although I quit it when gopc.net didn't allow me to install any applications.

All of these performance upgrades have one thing is common: out: new features; in: a lot of performance boosts. And here's the big question about all these performance upgrades. Where have you guys been all of those years? Have you forgot about us? Have you been deserted in the feature-land with all bridges burnt? Sometimes it makes me wonder. For years, Microsoft have added more and more and then more menu items on its Office applications - just enough to confuse you and obscure the real important ones. And who remembers the 'Offline pages' feature on early IEs? or the newsreader that came along with them?

I can't blame all those product managers who succumbed to the feature pressure. The "just throw more hardware at it" approach used to work on some situations, and was definitely enough sometimes. And Moore's law predicted that this trend will continue, maybe ad-infinitum. One might think, that it didn't reach the good developers. Well, you are right about the good ones. But all the rest - and more so, their managers - completely forgot to ask the right questions and never got the time to architect it right. Let's get it out there, fast, they said, and then let's get the next version, too.

But not any more. In a competitive environment, finally, finally, some companies are making products that at last gives me the feeling that I'm sitting next to a modern computer.
As we saw how Windows Vista is being actively cut back (can you imagine, features actually dropped); as we saw browsers like Chrome take off with an easy start; as the iPhone exploded with popularity, we knew: performance is back. And I hope it is here to stay.