Isn't this making a bit of a leap? Management could be correctly measuring that keeping load times below 1s will cost them $10m/year and yield them $1m/year in increased revenue (made up numbers for the sake of example, of course), i.e. making improvements would have negative ROI.

I'd love for the console to be faster, but it's already way better than AWS (I haven't tried Azure so can't comment there) so I'm not sure I'd want to increase my cloud spend just to get better load times.

There's a general cognitive bias on HN where performance is assumed to be a feature that your product _must_ have, because we bias heavily towards individuals that appreciate good craftsmanship in our tools. I like well-crafted tools too, but it's important to keep in mind that the ROI on polishing a tool isn't always there, and that's one of the realities of life in a world of scarcity with limited resources to be allocated.

This is just speculation of course, it could well be that GCP's management is incompetent, and they haven't measured the dollar-per-unit-performance tradeoff; my point is that I don't think you've substantiated the claims of incompetence, rather you've assumed that the ROI on performance improvements must be positive. I know Google has done such experiments on the loading time for search results, I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows the details about whether this has been done in GCP.