Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

It is even worse for widely deployed applications. To pick on some favorites, Microsoft Teams and One Drive have lousy performance and burn up a ton of cpu. Both are deployed to tens/hundreds of millions of consumers, squandering battery life and electricity usage globally. Even a tiny performance improvement could lead to a fractional reduction in global energy use.

View on HN

I wish they would do this. But my experience is that building efficient software is hard, and is very very hard the larger the team gets or the longer the product exsits.

Even zoom, used to be very efficient, but has gradually got worse over time :-(

I would find this more compelling if we were not discussing a trillion dollar company that employs tens of thousands of programmers. The One Drive performance is so bad I cannot imagine anyone has put any effort into prioritizing efficiency. Naive, first effort attempt was packaged up and never revisited.

While that is true, its really not easy to do without re-writing from scratch and scrapping a load of features which is organisationally difficult to do.

What large piece of software with a user interface do you work with that is actually fast and stays fast? For me, its probably just Chrome / Firefox. Everything else seems to get slower over time.

I doubt that it would be good business for Microsoft though. The people who use them, and the people who buy them and force others to use them are two separate groups, and anyone who cares even a bit about user experience and has power to make the decision has already switched to something different. It's also the users, not Microsoft who pays for the wasted power and lost productivity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com