> Think about all the gas that is saved because people don’t have to drive to the library....

You're right that computers have saved huge amounts of energy compared with the things you mention. My point here was that even more could be saved with a bit of thought about efficiency in programming.

It's not either-or. I don't buy the argument that if we didn't shovel garbage that we call "software" today, we wouldn't have equivalent but better software at all. It's a multi-agent problem, and a lot of it is driven by business dysfunction, not even actual complexity or programmer laziness.

In my - perhaps limited - work experience, there's enough slack in the process of software development that I don't buy the "time to market" argument all that much.

If websites and business software were as lean as they could be, most computers could have amazingly weak, low-powered processors.

I'm quite disenchanted with software myself. It takes way too long to open any program, for this JIRA ticket to properly display.

One thing that has improved was boot times, I seem to remember that Windows 7 was quite a bit faster than XP. Maybe someone in upper management wanted it to be as fast as MacOS? So speed IS possible, if it is prioritized.