Speed is a feature

Millions of programs have that unfulfilled potential of becoming your second nature, something you don’t even think about when interacting with. They’re waiting to be enabled to “click”. Speed is a feature.

Now imagine: how many programs and services make us wait more than 100ms? I’d say more or less all of them, starting with almost every website, with a few exceptions. You don’t think about “requesting” Google when you type your search query and it auto-completes after each letter. But you do think about rebooting your computer. Or booting up your t... See more

When they did crossed that 100ms barrier, though, a qualitative change happened. People changed their views of a tool from something they have to cope with to something that’s fun, valuable and eventually become their second nature. Now they can’t imagine how they lived otherwise.

So they’ve designed couple of features for a very narrow and specific use-case, polished the integration, removed all other barries and otherwise did everything right and, apparently, brought a lot of value. Yet nobody considered it valuable enough until they got the response time right.