Performance is obviously important, to suggest otherwise is just silly.

Both Google and Amazon have researched this topic and the results are readily available. First link I found: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and...

Why do you think there some much time and effort going into improving performance of computing in general. Facebook Lite, android go, GPU's, cpu improvements, 5g, etc.

The important caveat is that once it's fast enough the gains are marginal.

Performance is obviously relevant in the margin. A performance improvement in your site might decrease dropoff or churn by something like 1-5%, which is a good number, and it will compound.

But if you are still at the stage in product development where adding features will increase your addressable market by tens or hundreds of percents (which doing things like ‘supporting multiple European languages’ or ‘adding google login’ can do) then those performance gains are not where engineering investment needs to go.

Arguing features vs performance is really about which features are more important. Performance is just another feature.

I use Vim and I use VSCode. There is little debate about which has better performance and which has more features. It's also easy to see which has more users.

Is it vim in all 3 categories?

Just two of them.

Or just one.

If you think Vim has less features than VSCode you haven’t used vim enough.

> The important caveat is that once it's fast enough the gains are marginal.

Based off how slow every SaaS service is in the B2B space, performance isn't important in all scenarios.

Marginal performance (i.e. 100 ms to 10 s per action, not multiple minute delays) is somewhat important to end users and matters only if they can switch easily. End users typically have little to no say in choosing the business software, especially after it's already bought.

Performance is usually a lower order concern than an app doing what you want. You can bail on a slow app because you're impatient all day long, but if it's the only way to do the thing you want to do, I 100% guarantee you're going to suck it up and use the app.