Not quite.. see my sibling response. It's probably more accurate to say that some people have thrown a lot of time and energy at the problem.

But the market does not value their software; we use slower and less secure alternatives.

Slack is a great example. There are probably 99 other chat services that perform better than Slack. (Apparently it makes fans spin on laptops, which is kind of shocking for a chat app.)

But the market doesn't necessarily care -- it values the features that Slack provides more.

Part of it is a bad network effect. I care about speed, but I might have to use Slack because the people I want to talk to on Slack don't care about speed.

I think the idea is that people stop optimizing for speed as soon as it gets "fast enough", and what "fast enough" means doesn't change at all if you make better tools and machines.

Faster machines and tools only really matters to people who are trying to do things that are currently never fast enough to put into production.