[_____s]

I'm not sure it's the cheap companies or developers driving this. Even companies that pay really well produce pretty slow software (Gmail, etc.). It's mostly the ecosystem in which software is developed.

As someone else said, businesses hire software engineers to solve business problems. Speed often isn't a priority. Fast software will make the experience perceivably better, but it's hard to get on a sales call and tell a potential customer that your application loads much faster when they are looking for feature X. And most companies buying software are looking at a checklist of features first and then maybe the experience.

You also need to put in the time to make software fast and then keep it fast. It's not something you can tack on at the end—if you want something to be fast, that has to be carefully considered from the very beginning. By the time people notice something is too slow, you're burdened by half baked architecture and a monstrosity of a codebase. At that point, it's near impossible to really make anything fast.

[gregjor]

> most companies buying software are looking at a checklist of features first and then maybe the experience.

I think the hugely successful SalesForce proves this point. Just one standout among many such products.

[bananaface]

I would argue they won because of marketing, not because they had unique functionality. Features are not that hard to build, most basic tooling can be cloned with a relatively small budget.