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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

#661

Post by spookie »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #490
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet. My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is alway…

> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster. The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vul…

Nah, it's about favouring bad programming practices, not thinking about the architecture of the software and giving developer experience a bigger role than end user experience. All these stemming from a push to get to market earlier or making employees replaceable.

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

#662

Post by hedora »

jonhohle wrote: post #601
sgarland wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…

https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

That really should include "sync write 4KB to an SSD". People don't realize it's purely in-RAM on the disk these days (you pay a PCIe round trip, and that's about it).

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

#664

Post by hedora »

Illotus wrote: post #638
SoftTalker wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.

Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.

That might have been true for the first five minutes of using the software (assuming the person had not yet used a CUA application before the first time they used office). After that, it was strictly worse.

CUA ~= "standard menus + keyboard shortcuts for dos and windows": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

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

#665

Post by thomasfromcdnjs »

plaidfuji wrote: post #287

Surprised there’s no mention of Google Workspace here. I’ve been using Workspace exclusively for probably 5 years now. It’s obviously faster to open, the interface has remained clean and simple, and they’ve steadily closed the feature gap with Word, Excel and PPT. The only major gap remaining, IMO, is on Sheets - performance as sheets get large or have lots of formulas, and plotting . If Google would take that produc…

I just sorted my drive by last modified ascending, I started using Google Docs in 2008, I don't remember using anything other than that since.

I did not realize how many people on HN are still using MS suite, a nice refreshing bubble buster.

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

#666

Post by zelphirkalt »

That is just the kind of duct tape, that they would come up with, instead of fixing the underlying issues. To be fair, probably by now the Office mess is unfixable in any sensible time frame, without a massive effort. And since offline/local Office is not a priority for MS at all, they are probably not willing to invest the resources, and continue to sell shitty software.

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

#668

Post by vlachen »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #491
kyrra wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like fast apps, maybe check out FilePilot, a Windows explorer alternative. https://filepilot.tech/ It's amazingly fast, though it's missing some features and will be really expensive when it leaves beta.

In my opinion Total Commander has always been the most ideal (also fast) file management tool since Windows 3.x. It was named Windows Commander back in the days but it still supports Windows 3.x as Total Commander.

I never knew it was a Windows program. I've been using it on my Android phones for years.

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

#669

Post by taeric »

spookie wrote: post #661
qwerty456127 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster. The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vul…

Nah, it's about favouring bad programming practices, not thinking about the architecture of the software and giving developer experience a bigger role than end user experience. All these stemming from a push to get to market earlier or making employees replaceable.

I'd guess less on "bad programming practices" and more "prioritizing development speed?" Mostly inline with your next point. We value getting things released and do not have a solid process for optimizing without adding new things.

Ironically, it was specifically the longer feedback cycle of long builds and scheduled releases that seems to specifically have given us better software?

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