See Wirth' Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law : "Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which

See Wirth' Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law : "Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster." In work environments, it can be even worse. It takes me (at work) 5 minutes to log in; 2 minutes to open a MS office app or email; 5-10s to save a document; 20s to insert a row in Excel. Please send help. The answer to your question depends: For office settings like I described, it may be due to forced network requests, and surveillance/compliance software. More broadly, it's unoptimized software, and various pieces of software competing for resources and scheduling. A mirror that may be easier to GROK is the web: Web apps can be small and responsive by using targeted DOM-manipulation. Most web apps use layers of frameworks, cookies, trackers etc that make them take up much more space, and make them less responsive. In order to fix this, we may need a new generation of operating systems and software, built from scratch, with a focus on performance (ie responsiveness). This is one of the reasons I've gotten so excited about embedded and low-level programming: You can ditch the OS, and make programs that respond in a way that feels instantaneous.