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He raises valid points, but the obvious difference is that people expect building a bridge to cost millions and take months, whereas most customers think building quality software is easy.

This is made worse by the fact that it is in fact easy to build a near-functional prototype. It's turning that into a quality project that takes the most time.

Modern software can be fast and efficient (see Google Chrome), but I guess most developers don't consider responsiveness a feature anymore.

My current instance of Chrome, with 16 tabs open is using 702,924k. Chrome is fast though.

How fast and efficient is it compared to Dillo?

Overall, responsiveness doesn't play well with feature creep. Now the problem is to sort useful features from useless fat. In the case of web browsers, what would you leave out? Flash? Javascript? CSS? Broken tag soup parsing? Personally, I think we would be better off without all those things, except CSS. I also bet that most of the world disagree with me.

I found this interesting near the end: http://emulators.com/docs/nx13_olpc.htm. The author wonders about A New Era For Personal Computing?

I think three years later, a lot of us are starting to see through to the other side. Funny that he mentioned the Newton, too.

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