>>So, we think of it as a good thing, we have the right amount of features with acceptable performance that will only be getting better.
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>Mike,
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>It sounds like you're not saying that it's necessarily a good thing that it runs slow, but rather that it's not a bad thing; an acceptable trade-off for what it will be able to do in the future. Why waste time coding for small advantages in speed now - possibly giving up some features - when the speed will likely take care of itself in a year or two with new technology? I never thought of it that way, but it makes sense.
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>Renoir

As I said : "I can understand that slow may not necessarily be a bad thing, but it can never be a good thing."

There's a world of difference between saying that the application running slow is a good thing and saying the the application running slow is not a bad thing.

The one danger with accepting features over performance now is that in the intervening years while the speed of the hardware catches up, more & more features get put in & the performance remains the same. If the product were cast in stone today then there wouldn't be a problem, but software is constantly evolving & there is often pressure to add more features to stay ahead.

I occassionally have to modify some old PLC code, I have the choice of using upto date, feature rich PLC programming s/w on my choice of Windows 98/2000/NT operating system on a range of the most upto date fastest PCs or using 10 year old PLC programming s/w, lacking any features with come to accept as standard, on an old 33Mhz 386 PC running DOS. I use the latter, because I don't need the majority of the features that have been added & it is much, much faster. The new features are nice, but the important word is "need".

There's also the cumulative problem where the programmers at MS take the view that getting the extra performance for the new OS isn't worth the cost, because the speed of processors will make up for it in a couple of years. And then the applications programmers take the same view, slow now but in a couple of years the processors will hide the fact. In between you've got various video drivers, printer drivers etc. By the time the processors are up to speed, the new OS comes out with the new app & drivers, no speed improvement is seen because each individual item was written without performance in mind.