How to beat Page's Law? Pretend you're coding for a Vic-20

"There’s no question that an app like Zoho Writer does Microsoft Word-like things in a more efficient way."

Bizarre line of the day.

A comparison of current MS Word with a word processor from the early 90s (or 80s!) would make sense. A comparison with a web app running on a server farm that you have to access via a browser (so as to layer more abstraction and bloat) is just strange.

Yes, software is getting more bloated, but it's also getting more powerful. The VIC-20 couldn't do any number of graphics related things our current range of hardware does on a regular basis. Take all your best engineers, and try to make it play a HD movie at an acceptable frame-rate. It's not going to happen.

This assumes that Page's Law is said negatively. That's not necessarily so. Speed is a feature like any other.

The vast majority of programs are written to solve a need for a human being, and if the answer comes in a human-acceptable time frame, it's Good Enough. Why waste time optimizing outer loops?