Thanks to the discussion I have realized that performance of product is much more important for the user experience than I originally have thought compared to other things like feature Y.

If the product does not have competition and is profitable you will get competitors at some point of time when they realize that they can outmatch you.

If the performance was not in the mind of the developers of the product anyone can win the competition by matching the product features and user experience, but make the user experience better by making the performance of the product better. They can even speed up the take over process by giving additional features to the customers. Once the users start to move to the competitors product because they have realized it's much better at doing the job the competitor can start to make the existing feature set user experience better like removing the really not needed additional mouse click.

The first products company will be having problems at this point, because they really need to start thinking new features the users will like and think how to make the user experience better, but to match the performance of the features they really need to start digging on the old code which might be messy as hell. Matching the performance of the competitor at this point is really costly, because you either have to create it again from scratch or start digging around the code and see where you can optimize. Once the performance has been optimized you might have lost ton of users and revenue.

While the first products company is trying to handle the performance issues the competitor will of course move further and further away and might even incrementally change some of the features of the product and at the same time teach the users to use it.

Then again if the first product had good performance from the start the competitor can not take advantage of this and you can keep up by giving the users better user experience.

Now someone give me enough money to compete with Facebook! JK.