> How is that possible in this age of data driven decision making?
Probably because reducing RAM usage has even less potential than a feature nobody uses. Someone might use a feature, so you can take a risk on it. Who (who might otherwise buy Slack) wouldn't buy Slack because it uses 1-2 gigs of RAM?
A lot of decisions are like that - individually, they’re the right one to make at the time, but they add up, and when there isn’t any serious framework for looking critically at their place in the whole, you end up with what we have, which is apps with a handful of core features people actually want and use, drowning in an avalanche of pointless bloated junk. And those apps in turn add up, even a latest gen m2 pro will struggle running Slack, Zoom, Excel, IntelliJ, Mail, Chrome etc etc which REALLY shouldn’t be the case. (AND proves that talk of “we don’t need to optimize, these days computers can easily run whatever” simply isn’t true - resources are like a vacuum, they expand junk until the junk fills the void, when the space could in fact have been better used by actually useful things)
Probably because reducing RAM usage has even less potential than a feature nobody uses. Someone might use a feature, so you can take a risk on it. Who (who might otherwise buy Slack) wouldn't buy Slack because it uses 1-2 gigs of RAM?