Maybe it’s just me but it feels as if modern software has been getting slower and slower. My computer is the fastest it has ever been and yet I’m more frustrated by the actual performance more than ever. Websites seem slower than they’ve ever been and I often find myself typing faster than the letters appear on the screen. Part of the problem is that everything seems to be web-based; in fact, many “desktop” apps are powered by Electron which is a wrapper around Chromium that makes it easy to write desktop apps. Unfortunately, easy doesn’t mean fast and we get the performance of a browser tab in standalone tab.

I genuinely believe there’s an opportunity for a company to start implementing every single popular web product in native desktop apps optimized for performance. Excel remains remains my favorite application - it’s fast, responsive, and has a ton of shortcuts for the power user. No matter how much work Google puts into Spreadsheets it still falls short of Excel. There’s just something about having a perfectly tuned desktop app that gets out of the way to let you focus on the work. It’s unfortunate how rare good software is these days and I like to think we’re due for a software renaissance.