It's a bad bet, historically.

I'm having an extremely hard time thinking of companies that have prospered due to software optimization. Most of them were swept away by hardware advances, instead.

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jmward01 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The 1980's US car industry comes to mind. Nearly wiped out because they refused to make efficient vehicles. SpaceX is arguably showing how a rethink towards efficient can take over an entire industry. I am sure there are strong examples in software as well but they aren't coming to mind.

I think when successful, optimization really just means 'finally built right' and people forget the ridiculously inefficient ways before.

	▲	sgc a minute ago \| parent [-]
		I would argue about 30% of Apple's success was just from not being slow annoying bloatware. I could never stomach it, but I know a lot of people who basically rage-quit Windows for the Apple ecosystem. I did the same, but for Linux.

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somethingweird an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Many of the current internet titans started by making things more efficient and accessible. Google for search, Facebook for connecting to people online, Microsoft for working with PCs at a reasonable price, Amazon for buying online as well as AWS. There are examples in other industries as well, Toyota is famous for it for example. There are probably counter examples but efficiency gains can be a huge deciding factor making companies successful.

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bravura an hour ago | parent [-]

You just listed a bunch of 0 to 1 companies, not 1 to 10 companies.

They weren’t quantitatively better than previous companies. They were qualitatively better.

	▲	cootsnuck an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think finding significant efficiency gains with LLMs and the like may lead to qualitatively better products. Looking at people's experiences to DSV4F makes me believe that even more than before too. I don't think people are realizing that speed can allow for categorically different user experiences that are more than just "worse than frontier capabilities but faster".

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hgoel an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The headroom for hardware advances is a lot lower now than it has been for most of the industry's existence, when Moore's law held strong. Now we find ourselves limited by cost, physics, fab capacity, and complexity of spinning up more fab capacity.

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cootsnuck an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Betting on innovation continuing to figure out ways to squeeze more out of less has historically been the right move. Look at Apple.

And I'd argue "hardware advances" are more proof of optimization.

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polymer8563 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

IBM wants a word

	▲	oblio 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		On what? OS/2 didn't fail due to lacking software optimization.