Comment Re:_why_ can't we keep throwing hardware at it? (Score 1) 161
Hardware is cheap. It's not an elegant solution, but it's cheap. And getting cheaper.
Right, but if your company comes up with an elegant solution that gets 10x better performance out of a given piece of hardware, and your competitors cannot (or do not) do the same, then you've got a cost advantage over your competitors and can use that to get customers to choose to buy your product rather than theirs.
That will always be true, no matter how fast and cheap the hardware gets. Either your customers will be able to do 10 times more work with your product, or (if there isn't 10 times more work to actually do), they can get the job done with 10 times less hardware (and thus 10 times less expense).
Focus on the UX, because without that, who cares what your kernel can do?
There is a whole world of software out there that runs in the background and doesn't require much (if any) UX. Think of the software that generates your credit card statement every month.