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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

#841

Post by lispisok »

afavour wrote: post #617
MisterTea wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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…

My personal theory is there is a threshold of performance. Below the threshold the experience is bad enough it affects revenue so getting the program up to speed becomes a priority. Above the threshold only features are prioritized to drive more revenue. That's why despite computers getting orders of magnitude faster computer programs seem to run about the same speed.

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

#842

Post by Lammy »

lizknope wrote: post #837
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 remember a laptop in the early 1990's that had Microsoft Office in ROM to load faster. I can't find a reference to it right now.

HP Omnibook 300? https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123

`Omnibook300Intro-5091-6270-6pages-May93.pdf` https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=123 sez:

> Built-in ROM applications don't use up disk space

- Microsoft Windows

- Microsoft Word for Windows

- Microsoft Excel

- Appointment Book

- Phone Book

- HP Calculator

- Microsoft File Manager

- LapLink Remote Access™

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

#843

Post by pradn »

_ah wrote: post #746

Wow, this takes me back. I actually worked on Office performance many years ago. We did a lot of very clever stuff to improve the product, even to the point of optimizing the byte ordering on disk (spinning rust) so that the initial boot would be faster. That said, it always felt a bit like a losing battle. The goal was "make Office not get slower". It's very hard to convince app teams that their new shiny abstractio…

> Typically, perf isn't a few bad decisions. It's a very large number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a bad result. If the team loses that discipline for even one moment then it's very very difficult to fix. I wonder if my former team still exists or if they've all been reassigned elsewhere.

This is precisely where the adage "premature optimization is the root of all evil" falls apart. You really do need everyone to care about performance to an obsessive, unreasonable degree to keep the entire, massive system performant. Companies with good engineering leadership understand this. The thousand cuts can come from language, libraries, feature creep, and pure ignorance or carelessness.

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

#844

Post by mpweiher »

rochak wrote: post #809
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Word, go back to Draft (formerly Normal) mode. That makes pagination asynchronous and reduces clutter not needed while editing.

Why does a user need to know and do this to get a just bearable experience? Has the bar gotten so low?

Yes.

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

#845

Post by drjasonharrison »

7657364574 wrote: post #763
MisterTea wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My guess is that we're already seeing the consequences of "AI-assisted programming". Just yesterday, Microsoft's CEO revealed that 30% of their code is written by AI.

Given the game of telephone which would have to had occurred for that 30% figure to travel from developers up to the CEO, it's probably including things like autocomplete...

The Plan

In the beginning, there was a plan, And then came the assumptions, And the assumptions were without form, And the plan without substance,

And the darkness was upon the face of the workers, And they spoke among themselves saying, "It is a crock of shit and it stinks."

And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."

And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying, "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, Such that none may abide by it."

And the Managers went unto their Directors saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."

And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."

And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."

And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor Of the company With very powerful effects."

And the President looked upon the Plan And saw that it was good, And the Plan became Policy.

And this, my friend, is how shit happens.

from anonymous email

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

#846

Post by mr_toad »

zamadatix wrote: post #12
rappatic wrote: post #6

Why on startup? Windows startup is already so painfully slow, especially compared to Apple silicon machines, and adding Office to it would only compound this problem. I think this problem can be avoided, while also still helping pre-load Office, if Windows just detects when resource utilization is low and loads Office in the background then.

> When Startup Boost is active, the scheduled task will not run immediately at login to avoid slowing down your PC — it will wait 10 minutes to ensure the system is in a steady idle state. Additionally, Startup Boost will be disabled when Energy Saver mode is active. Startup Boost only runs if you have launched Word recently, and if you have not launched Word recently it will automatically disable itself. If you meet…

Is this just a fancy name for (re)starting the application in the background?

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

#847

Post by nikanj »

calf wrote: post #782
nikanj wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you try to bring up perf at any point during the design phase, people pull the ”Knuth said premature optimization is the root of all evil” card. As if you could design and build a Ford Pinto, then hotspot optimize it into a Saturn V

Was Knuth talking about deployed software when he wrote that?

He wrote that in 1974. Software products were orders of magnitude smaller back then.

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

#848

Post by daedrdev »

stevage wrote: post #620
_7acn wrote: post #498

I recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work. It seems like things like this are no longer possible for Microsoft. They keep producing clunky tools which, although functional, always come with a horribly frustrating UX (as usual). I've…

> A recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work. And yet, weirdly, macOS comes up with absolutely no image editor of any kind. There's no equivalent of MS Paint. It's infuriating.

yeah I was surprised to find myself donwloading gimp for image editing. However, Microsofts modern paint (paint3d? I dont remember what they call it) is atrocious imo so I can't really fault apple.

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

#849

Post by daedrdev »

wafflemaker wrote: post #412
dijit wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a decent programmer. I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level anti-cheats before, and I’m aware how unpopular they are; so, sorry for that… you would also accuse us of “bad programming” if there was an overabundance of cheaters that went undetected and/or uncorrected. The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level anti-cheats themselves ar…

This is well written and quite easy to understand. (I only have cursory knowledge of programming.) However, what if Primeagen meant that HAVING to IMPLEMENT kernel level anti cheat is a symptom of bad programming, and not the anti cheat per se? (that is, with good enough programming, it could somehow be avoided). And kudos to you. I appreciate people in game dev, they can get a lot done in short time. I haven't playe…

The cheaters are very good these days. They will happily sit in the kernel space to hide from the game if needed, because people pay a lot of money to cheat developers to be able to cheat.

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

#850

Post by vacuity »

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…

I'm also young and heavily favor simple, quality software. Age is a highly coarse proxy for one's experiences, but in this case I think it has more to do with my personality. I have enough experience in computing that I don't think I'm making demands that are unrealistic, although they are certainly unrealistic if we maintain current incentives and motives.
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