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Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

pcworld.com

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Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#211

Post by bjackman »

kilotaras wrote: post #119

Team X is responsible for feature Foo; feature Foo is slow; team X introduces Foo-preload, metrics go up, person responsible gets a bonus. Multiply that by tens (or even hundreds) of teams and your app startup (either on desktop or mobile) is now a bloated mess. Happened to Office, Facebook iOS and countless others. One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.

> One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.

The only way to achieve performance metrics in a large org IMO.

Google Search is still fast because if you degrade p99 latency an SRE will roll back your change. Macbooks still have good battery life because Apple have an army of QA engineers and if they see a bump on their Ammeters that MacOS release doesn't go ahead.

Everything else (especially talking about "engineers these days just don't know how to write efficient code") is noise. In big tech projects you get the requirements your org encodes in its metrics and processes. You don't get the others. It's as simple as that.

Never worked at MS but it's obvious to me that the reason Windows is shit is that the things that would make it good simply aren't objectives for MS.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#213

Post by cornholio »

bgro wrote: post #154

This is the kind of genius move you get when all your devs play leetcode all day and then have leetcode battles as an interview service. Hundreds of millions of hours spent microfussing over leetcode and gatekeeping work because your solution isn’t copied from the top 5 solutions character for character. Only for the same devs to just abandon all optimization in the real job where it actually matters and implement an…

Coding interviews used to be FizzBuzz in the era of Joel Spolsky, then Google upped the bar to things like A*, Boyer Moore and brain teasers with pirates splitting booty to screen for those "real 10x geniuses".

Then everybody jumped on that cargocult because Google is a trillion dollar company, so they must be doing something right, am I rite, never-mind their immense monopolies and first mover advantages. So now everybody was looking for the mythical 10xers

It all metastasized into the present where you have poor college kids in India grinding Leetcode to get SDET jobs for some Bangalore outsource center. I can't even

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#214

Post by bgro »

torben-friis wrote: post #183
QuantumSeed wrote: post #175

I think Microsoft may doing that with Microsoft Edge as well. My Windows 11 Registry has an HKCU key called MicrosoftEdgeAutoLaunch_[...] "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe" --no-startup-window --win-session-start

I haven’t used a windows machine for like 15 years, but back when I was a teenager I could swear computer magazines included all kinds of tips about unchecking things from the auto startup menu, some modifying the registry. Did this pattern stop being a thing and we’re back to it now? Or was it just “forgotten”?

Startup shortcuts are one thing to manage but it’s gotten pretty out of control for most standard software now. Perhaps it used to be one-off annoying programs like 15 years ago.

Now there’s scrolling through hundreds of scheduled tasks called dfddg.exe with no title or description and located in c:/windows or %appdata%. Disabling the wrong identically named one bricks your system or software licenses.

Then you also have to check the registry and group policy and environment variables and spot the unwanted item that is again often bundled into a critical windows dll. Usually with the same name as the dll and its permissions are set as SYSTEM so you can’t edit it by normal means.

Then after every change you have to do a full rebooting and review all steps again. Often, they will regenerate themselves if deleted in the wrong way or the wrong order.

After all the startup things are killed there may still be kernel level startup recovery processes for things like Adobe.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#215

Post by skc »

I just opened Word and Excel after a cold start of the OS (Windows 11)

Both opened fully in a second. So just how much faster should these apps actually open?

I suspect this is aimed at Enterprise installations where the machines are gunked up with corporate spyware.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#216

Post by fnordsensei »

rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

I was disappointed that I had to upgrade to Steam Launcher 11, since it provided no benefits in launching Steam over Steam Launcher 10, or 7.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#217

Post by claudex »

andruby wrote: post #165
vasco wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office codebase is soon going to probably be older than most people that work on it.

That could already be the case. The initial release is from 1990, so the codebase is at least 35 years old. I don't have a good guess for the average age of software developers at Microsoft, but claude.ai guesses the average "around 33-38 years" and the median "around 35-36 years old".

Office was released in 1990, but Excel in 1985 and Word in 1983.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#218

Post by bgro »

globular-toast wrote: post #146
shermozle wrote: post #141

This from the team that brought a tool to recover files corrupted by Office, rather than fix the causes of file corruption. Then it becomes a "feature" you can trumpet, rather than a bug you squashed.

I wonder if other industries could get away with this. Imagine a drug company that pedalled both a highly addictive toxin and the antidote.

What? This is what lobbying is. Intuit TurboTax. Realpage. Then entire insurance industry. TSA easy check or whatever it’s called.

Fully fabricated problems with fabricated solutions often becoming legally required to be purchased to avoid the problem they cause in the first place.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#219

Post by bambax »

tomatocracy wrote: post #163
bambax wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature. I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

Although I agree about the ribbon and UI, I think Excel 2003 in particular feels quite limited today - it can deal with a max of 255 columns in a sheet and is missing some of the most useful functions (SUMIFS and XLOOKUP spring to mind especially but also the newer array functions like SORT).

Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC. I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs solves beyond sumif.

XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match).

Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#220

Post by bambax »

reddalo wrote: post #193
threatripper wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it be free if you need to buy a license?

I think the user meant that it's "free to keep", it's not a recurring subscription like modern Office versions.

Yes.
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