By itself, I would agree.
However, in this metaphor, concrete got 15x cheaper in the same timeframe. Not enough to fully compensate for the difference, but enough that a whole generation are now used to much larger edifices.
(At this point the analogy breaks down because who pays for the software being slower is the users' time, not the taxes paid by a government buying a bridge from a civil engineer…)
* I don't actually buy the argument that the last decade or so of layers of "abstraction" save us developers any time at all, rather I think they're now several layers deep of nested inner platforms that each make things more complicated, but that's a separate entire thread, and blog post: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html
The word processors of 30 years ago often had limits like “50k chapters” and required “master documents” for anything larger. Lotus 123 had much fewer columns or rows than modern excel.
Not an excuse, of course, but the older tools are not usable anymore if you have modern expectations.
I would be interested to know the name of the program that did all that within the same app during that time period.
For some reason Slack gets criticism for being “bloated” when it basically does anything you could possibly imagine and is essentially a business communication application platform. Nobody can actually name a specific application that does everything Slack does with better efficiency.
And you bring up things that are supposedly bad about Slack that are basically non-existent boogeymen. UI stutter, load time, and excessive memory use, I can’t think of any time any of these things have existed at all or noticeably impacted my experience on Slack on a basic low end laptop.
Those older apps like MSN Messenger and the original Skype didn’t actually do the things that Slack does now. I mean specifically multiple simultaneous screen shares plus annotations plus HD video feeds (with important features like blurred and replaced backgrounds, added by Skype in 2019) for all participants plus running an entire productivity app in the background at the same time.
Skype didn’t have screen sharing, at all, until 2009.
https://content.dsp.co.uk/history-of-skype
You call this situation “unjustifiable” but we would struggle to find any personal computing device sold at any price point that can’t handle the application smoothly. If I go back five years and buy a $200 mini PC or a $300 iPad or $500 laptop it’s going to run Slack just fine.
Specs are just arbitrary numbers on a box. It doesn’t matter that we got to the moon using a turd and a ham sandwich for a computer.
You can’t accept that the layperson doesn’t care that back in my day we walked uphill both ways for 15 miles on our dial-up connection. If it works, it works.
