I really utterly despise this kind of exceptionalism.

You know, you probably don’t feel that your car has air in the fuel line or that your transmission is holding on to old oil.

What you will “feel” is that your car feels “worse” and you won’t be able to put words on why.

Just because non-technical people lack the understanding to put into words the things they feel: does not mean they don’t feel them.

Give them Office 2008 on a 10 year old PC and ask them how it feels, I guarantee they’ll say “better” without knowing why.

▲ echoangle 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Probably true, but maybe you should also ask them how much they would be willing to pay to fix that. I guess it would be less than $100 for the lifetime of their device.

▲ Dylan16807 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That would pay for so many millions of dollars of dev time. It would be a big win-win if you could organize that deal. In the tradeoff between more dev time and better hardware, typical consumer software is way too tilted toward the latter and wasting lots of money.

If you don't think people are willing to pay, phrase it as $100 more for software and $200 less for hardware with better overall performance.

The problem is that hardware performance is easy to upgrade and software performance isn't.

▲ cwel 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This implies that a better version is on offer. It is not. You get the telemetry stuffed, stuttery garbage, and your company pays for it.

▲ echoangle an hour ago | parent [-]

That wasn’t what I meant. I am saying that the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough. The average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care, so there’s no pressure to change.

	▲	cwel an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I understand what you meant. `> the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough` I wouldn't say that's THE reason, or even a contender. The average user has little agency over what the established tools are. There is no pressure to change the tools because there is no competition. You use what your employer dictates. office and/or gsuite. Whether or not people 'want it enough' has very little to do with whether something actually occurs. `> average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care` this part is still true.