Yes, binary size, deployment size, deployment time, LoC, source code zipped size, number of directories in GitHub, number of repositories in GitHub. I have heard all kind of VC metrics to increase ‘success’ of being believable by partners, clients and VCs. Small and lean is something ‘they’ generally do not believe anymore.
In a rather successful business I had, I had a product of a few 100kb which installed easily on servers; just ./install.sh. Someone told me that this was really not smart. The script downloaded it’s dependencies (just rpm install; nothing proprietary) and then it copied the binary to /use/local/bin. I figured I could fix 2 issues at once; people running other distros complained that it did (obviously) not work; in our target audience, well over 90% ran rpm based distros, mostly centos. This was before Docker etc so I changed the install to apt-get and included a zipped chrooted Debian with everything already installed in it. Suddenly install.sh was over 100s of mbs and worked on any x86 Linux. It indeed made sales jump with people saying in forums that ours was bigger than even the largest competitor install download so it must be better. It is lame but true; especially when people pay for stuff, they want to get bang for their buck.
Yeah, the same concept applies to airline and hotel sites and apps
Their server returns results instantly but found that if they showed a loading animation (even fancy ones like an animated svg or gif of a cartoon passenger in an airplane) that people trusted the results more
In a rather successful business I had, I had a product of a few 100kb which installed easily on servers; just ./install.sh. Someone told me that this was really not smart. The script downloaded it’s dependencies (just rpm install; nothing proprietary) and then it copied the binary to /use/local/bin. I figured I could fix 2 issues at once; people running other distros complained that it did (obviously) not work; in our target audience, well over 90% ran rpm based distros, mostly centos. This was before Docker etc so I changed the install to apt-get and included a zipped chrooted Debian with everything already installed in it. Suddenly install.sh was over 100s of mbs and worked on any x86 Linux. It indeed made sales jump with people saying in forums that ours was bigger than even the largest competitor install download so it must be better. It is lame but true; especially when people pay for stuff, they want to get bang for their buck.