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This is definitely an interesting take on the car analogy so thanks for posting it! I don't know that I agree 100% (I think I could 'settle' for a car that need

This is definitely an interesting take on the car analogy so thanks for posting it! I don't know that I agree 100% (I think I could 'settle' for a car that needed be be fueled once or twice a year if it came with some other noticeable benefits), but it is definitely worth remembering that sometimes an apparently small nudge in performance can enable big improvements. Miniaturization of electronics (including batteries and storage media) and continuing improvements to wireless broadband come to mind as the most obvious of these in the past decades. I'm struggling to think of recent (or not-so-recent) software improvements that have had a similar impact though. It seems like many of the "big" algorithms and optimization techniques that underpin modern applications have been around for a long time, and there aren't a lot of solutions that are "just about" ready to make the jump from supercomputers to servers, servers to desktops, or desktops to mobile. I guess machine learning is a probably contender in this space, but I imagine that's still an active area of optimization and probably not what the author of the article had in mind. I'd love if someone could provide an example of recent consumer software that is only possible due to careful software optimization.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
V8 would be one example. Some time ago, JavaScript crossed a performance threshold, which enabled people to start reimplementing a lot of desktop software as web applications. In the following years, algorithms for collaborative work were developed[0], which shifted the way we work with some of those applications, now always on-line. That would be the meaningful software improvements I can think of. Curiously, the key enabler here seems to be performance - we had the capability to write web apps for a while, but JS was too slow to be useful. -- [0] - They may or may not have been developed earlier, but I haven't seen them used in practice before the modern web.
AgentOrange1234 7y ago
> sometimes an apparently small nudge in performance can enable big improvements In this thought experiment we are talking about a 2 orders magnitude improvement - hardly a small nudge!

TeMPOraL 7y ago

V8 would be one example. Some time ago, JavaScript crossed a performance threshold, which enabled people to start reimplementing a lot of desktop software as web applications. In the following years, algorithms for collaborative work were developed[0], which shifted the way we work with some of those applications, now always on-line. That would be the meaningful software improvements I can think of. Curiously, the key enabler here seems to be performance - we had the capability to write web apps for a while, but JS was too slow to be useful. -- [0] - They may or may not have been developed earlier, but I haven't seen them used in practice before the modern web.

AgentOrange1234 7y ago

> sometimes an apparently small nudge in performance can enable big improvements In this thought experiment we are talking about a 2 orders magnitude improvement - hardly a small nudge!