I have an opposite example. My father built a cryptography software in the 80's. Some of his clients complained that the app felt too simple and cheap for the price they were paying. So my father added a timer so the app would wait a few seconds pretending it's working. Just so the whole process would take longer. No one ever complained about the app feeling cheap again.
Which reminds me of the incredibly bloated software by Adobe and Autodesk. When compared to Blender.org which opens and runs dozens of times faster on hundreds times less memory. For a full featured product. I can't count how many times I've heard that blender feels worse than maya only because it's faster and free.
I once worked in a company where one of the teams was working on a large database indexing routine for a client.
The whole thing took a couple of seconds to run, even with a live data set, which was perceived by the account manager as "too fast" - basically not worth the amount the customer was paying as it was seen as doing too little, so a 30 second delay was implemented in the routine. Did nothing, just waited 30 seconds. Account manager happy, software delivered, client happy.
A couple of years later one of the team, now a contractor was asked to help the client optimise the system as with the increased data volumes the indexing routine was now taking closer to a minute to run.
I don't even want to think what he charged them for the 30 second performance improvement he managed...
I have often wondered whether this feeling of software being insubstantial slows down the propagation of FOSS in general? People seem to feel they are getting less of a tool when they can download something for free and don't have to wait for it to perform tasks as they would with larger, more bloated works.
This may be a little off topic, but I wonder how much of this phenomenon is born out of consumerism? We are used to having to wait or forfeit other luxuries in order to gain access to high quality things, so when we are presented with an excellent, free solution our perception of it is automatically jaded by our beliefs? Is this international?
I don't think it has much to do with consumerism, but rather how your perceptions shape your expectations. If it is 'difficult', we expect it to require a relatively increased amount of effort (see: time) to complete. This is only heightened when the task is something we are unfamiliar with, and have no idea how it should work.
For example, encryption - I, and apparently the people in the above example, have little or no understanding about how it works at a fundamental level. So if I was having something encrypted I would expect, due to ignorance and having it's difficulty on a pedestal, that it would take a reasonable amount of time to complete - certainly not instantaneous.
I think this idea applies to everything, not just software. If you paid $10k for something you probably will consider it valuable and treasure it. Even if there are better alternatives out there you're likely to have some emotional attachment. You put in research before investing that much money and you're likely to rationalize and defend your decision to purchase it.
Whereas when you get something for free you obviously have no financial investment. You can just throw it away without any care or feeling of loss. You're likely to perceive it as having no tangible value at first. The more time and resources you invest into that the more you will start perceiving the value.
I had the same thing happen with a site that did searches for, lets say hotel deals (not really but same idea). At the time expedia and all of the other competitors searches took a while with a loading page displaying for several seconds. But since their data was pulled in and cached locally the searches were as fast as any normal page load. They thought it seemed too fast compared to the industry and that people wouldn't trust it. So we stuck in a transitional loading page that lasted a few seconds.
Neither here nor there, but FYI in English "software" is typically partitive and not denumerable, i.e. you should say "some cryptography software", or else something like "a cryptography program" or "a cryptography application."
wasn't there an article saying they had to do the same with the face unlock for android? they had to delay it's action because it was too fast to seem it was actually working.
>Which reminds me of the incredibly bloated software by Adobe and Autodesk. When compared to Blender.org which opens and runs dozens of times faster on hundreds times less memory.
I don't know about Autodesk. This "bloated Adobe software" meme doesn't hold though. Try opening a 200MB to 1GB image file in Photoshop and any competing editor. See which one will crumble. See which one will perform actions on the image faster.
PS may have UI bloat (custom flash panels, for one) and feature bloat, but it's a very performant and stable application for what it does. It does not have "memory" bloat. Most of the size of the app is assets (icons, vectors, fonts, templates, etc).
As for the actual code, if you don't use a feature the code isn't even loaded in memory --the OS does that automatically for any app.
Which reminds me of the incredibly bloated software by Adobe and Autodesk. When compared to Blender.org which opens and runs dozens of times faster on hundreds times less memory. For a full featured product. I can't count how many times I've heard that blender feels worse than maya only because it's faster and free.