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

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

#671

Post by nextos »

trealira wrote: post #622
afavour wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary. Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions me…

Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software. About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software bec…

Aside from slowness, feature creep leads to poor quality, i.e. tons of bugs and user confusion with ever-changing graphical interfaces.

If software was simpler, we could afford to offer some formal guarantees of correctness. Model check protocols, verify pre and post conditions à la Dafny, etc.

There's too much change for the sake of change.

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

#672

Post by n8m8 »

bcraven wrote: post #237
andruby wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

"but claude.ai guesses" To my ears this is the equivalent of "some guy down the pub said", but maybe I am a luddite.

You're not a luddite, they disclosed it because you're _supposed_ to take it with a grain of salt

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

#673

Post by jacurtis »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #408
barrkel wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.

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 actually use IntelliJ and Sublime interchangeably throughout the day. I default to sublime for most work because of how snappy fast it is. I only load up Intellij when I need to do something that leverages its full IDE capabilities. To second your comment, I encourage people to try Sublime, you will be shocked at how fast it feels.

I still love IntelliJ, its a great product. But it is slow, bloats the computer, needs constant updating. But at least its incredibly powerful as a tradeoff to the bloat.

The Office debate is slightly different. It is slow, bloats the computer, needs constant updating. But unlike IntelliJ i dont feel that there is any advantage to all that added weight. We are using a word processor. We type words onto a blank screen. Why is Word and Outlook the most common applications to crash my computer that has an M1 Max Chip with 48Gb of Memory? I can literally run and build AI models on my computer with no problem but you boot up Microsoft Word to type words onto a blank page and you have a 33% chance of crashing the computer.

Google Sheets and Docs are actually better tools in my opinion for most people. 99% or more of the features you need are available in the google equivalents. These products are fast and run in a browser! The UI is actually VASTLY superior to Microsoft's ribbon. I still can't find stuff that I need on a routine basis and have to google it. I don't have this problem when using Google's office equivalents.

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

#674

Post by tharkun__ »

MisterTea wrote: post #555
barrkel wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.

> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

I will make this analogy:

Have a large ZIP file. Preferably like a few gigs and lots of (small) files.

Try to open it with the built-in Windows 11 tooling from Microsoft. It's going to be super slow to even show anything never mind unpack it.

Now install say 7-zip and do the exact same thing(s) and it's going to be instant opening and unpacking it takes a much much smaller amount of time (only limited by disk speed).

Turns out optimizations / not doing stupid things is still a thing even with all this raw power we now have.

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

#675

Post by jacurtis »

I have an M1 Max with 48 Gb of memory. It is 11am right now, and so far today, Outlook has crashed twice and Excel has crashed once. Word crashes about 50% of the time, but I do everything in my power to avoid launching Word since it is for some reason the worst contender.

Granted, the corporate malware on my computer doesn't help the situation. I can literally build AI Models from scratch on my computer. But if I boot up a Microsoft Office product I have a 33% chance that it crashes.

How can I build an AI model with no issue, find and replace instantly in an IDE for a projects that is tens of gigabytes and thousands of files with no issue. But I want to write a sentance onto a blank page in Microsoft Word, or Reply "thanks" to an email in Microsoft Outlook and the application crashes or takes 3 minutes to load?

I truly do not understand how Microsoft Office is still the dominant enterprise platform. These applications have horrible UIs, they are bloated, slow, and expensive. Yet every IT department foams at the mouth and gets a hard-on to sign their Microsoft 365 contract for $200 per user.

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

#676

Post by netsharc »

mapt wrote: post #648
afavour wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary. Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions me…

I saw the writing on the wall when I had to install a couple 150MB IDEs to run 101-level Java programs in the mid 2000's. 150 megabytes. MEGABYTES. I could consume about 1 kilobyte per minute of fantasy novel text in uncompressed ASCI, call it 1/8th that fully compressed. That means this compressed binary you're handing me is around 1.2 billion minutes of work (more if ingesting a novel is faster than writing/testing…

I looked it up, you want an illegal taxi? 168 MB: https://apkcombo.com/uber/com.ubercab/

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

#677

Post by tomatocracy »

bambax wrote: post #219
tomatocracy wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The problem with the column limit is not so much about huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I’d be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But 255 columns does feel quite constraining.

And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.

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

#678

Post by carlosjobim »

jacurtis wrote: post #675

I have an M1 Max with 48 Gb of memory. It is 11am right now, and so far today, Outlook has crashed twice and Excel has crashed once. Word crashes about 50% of the time, but I do everything in my power to avoid launching Word since it is for some reason the worst contender. Granted, the corporate malware on my computer doesn't help the situation. I can literally build AI Models from scratch on my computer. But if I bo…

The customer is not the user for Microsoft products.

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

#679

Post by Illotus »

hedora wrote: post #664
Illotus wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really, it is much more discoverable for most people. If interested, MS UI lead has a blog about lot of the reasons for ribbon and on the research backing it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh

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

#680

Post by likium »

bsrkf wrote: post #549

Since this thread, rightfully so (and in full agreement), has people complain about the bloat of today's software stack, is it only me in thinking there may be sincere potential profit streams for high quality paid software? I would happily pay for software that was high-quality was fast was privacy preserving had sane defaults had/provided reasonable support/insight (forum and developer blog) had a fair pricing mode…

There is a viable market, it exists as a word + excel combination like Notion, Coda and Monday. Notion just recently had an email and calendar client.

And I don't think non-US or non EU-wages, or being open source would help. Microsoft's success is due to the lock in and GTM sales org that Microsoft has. Just see how Teams eclipsed over Slack despite the latter being a first-mover and a better quality product.

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