Patience is one of the highest virtues men should strive for - but it should have no place when it comes to your software. Because whenever your employees or customers have to wait for your slow software to respond, you’re losing money.
Especially traditional business software such as SAP or Salesforce are certainly not notorious for their blazingly fast loading speeds. This is the time you realize that the tools that are actually supposed to help your organization be more productivity do actually decrease your overall performance.
In fact, some employees even get embarrassed by the fact that their system's performance is so poor. Just think how often you have called a hotline and the service agent told you: “I’m sorry about the delay. My computer is unusually slow today” - but this is only a half-truth, because this person probably has that same problem every single day; they’re just making an excuse so the customer doesn’t learn that this is how things will be every time he calls to make an inquiry, order a product, get support, or simply ask a question.
The influence of application performance has been extensively researched, especially in the context of e-commerce and online marketing. Amazon — a company that offers lots of browser-based apps for everything from streaming video to enjoying music — discovered that even a one-tenth of one second waiting period significantly diminishes their revenue. Response time was identified as correlating highly with the bounce rate of a webpage. One-tenth of a second doesn’t seem like a long time, but users clearly notice the difference. Just like you wouldn't enjoy a video at less than 24 frames per second, you wouldn't care much to shop online if it took a few seconds to load a product list.
Ultimately, your business needs user-friendly, responsive software and apps to remain competitive in your industry. The easier and faster you make things for both your workers and your potential customers, the more money you’ll make, as numerous companies have already discovered.
A lot of developers simply care about crude functionality, often implemented in a naive way, without really considering the implications of efficiency and performance, nor the potential scalability issues of a feature once it's used simultaneously by hundreds of users.
This is the very reason why our development at ZeyOS always applies the principal "performance is a feature": We do not take shortcuts or simply implement crude functionality, but always focus on the user experience first - and the user experience is dominated by the application's speed and responsiveness.
After all: Wouldn't you rather put your team in the driver's seat of a sports car than a mini van! :-)
