One of the business factors is the amount of competition.
If you're in a field where specific features dominate, then sub-second performance differences likely won't make a difference. Modern web browsers are roughly equivalent in feature support, so performance is one of the deciding factors for users. (If you had a web browser which didn't have CSS support but which was 100x faster in page display and Javascript performance, then I suspect you'll have few users)
Now, orders of magnitude performance differences might affect things, but then that's changing the market.
It's true that in a competition where features dominate the performance won't make much difference, but what if your competitor realizes this and matches your feature set with better performance? You just lost pretty much all of your users when your users notice this and move as the competitors users and even if you try to push some new feature your competitor will do it too. So i'm just saying worry about the performance, because if your business actually is good you will get competitors at some point.
Though social networking is annoying because count of users in the network is pretty much a feature of the network. One of the things I think Google never has realized. With larger amount of users you have feature domination easily and the users will keep using your network even if it's slow.
Actually here in Finland we have one major community site which is one of the slowest and most bad mouthed service everyone use it because the users are there and not somewhere else.
Then you're SOL. That's part of being in a competitive environment.
It doesn't happen that often. Features are hard. Performance is hard. Features and performance is very hard. If a company can pull of both then it deserves the new customers.
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One of the business factors is the amount of competition.
If you're in a field where specific features dominate, then sub-second performance differences likely won't make a difference. Modern web browsers are roughly equivalent in feature support, so performance is one of the deciding factors for users. (If you had a web browser which didn't have CSS support but which was 100x faster in page display and Javascript performance, then I suspect you'll have few users)
Now, orders of magnitude performance differences might affect things, but then that's changing the market.
It's true that in a competition where features dominate the performance won't make much difference, but what if your competitor realizes this and matches your feature set with better performance? You just lost pretty much all of your users when your users notice this and move as the competitors users and even if you try to push some new feature your competitor will do it too. So i'm just saying worry about the performance, because if your business actually is good you will get competitors at some point.
Though social networking is annoying because count of users in the network is pretty much a feature of the network. One of the things I think Google never has realized. With larger amount of users you have feature domination easily and the users will keep using your network even if it's slow.
Actually here in Finland we have one major community site which is one of the slowest and most bad mouthed service everyone use it because the users are there and not somewhere else.
Then you're SOL. That's part of being in a competitive environment.
It doesn't happen that often. Features are hard. Performance is hard. Features and performance is very hard. If a company can pull of both then it deserves the new customers.