I DM'ed 3rd edition and 4th edition campaigns. The author of this article said that 4th edition made combat much longer and that's not true. Once my players got up to speed with the new system, our combat encounters ran about twice as fast as 3.5 did. I also had the impression that 4.0 had been designed with writing computer games in mind (whereas 3.5 would have been a nightmare to code into a game).