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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

#961

Post by erkt »

mrguyorama wrote: post #776
erkt wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightroom 5 is miles better than what they offer today. Lightroom Creative Cloud is steaming dog shit. Adobe seriously gets to extort over $120 a year out of me simply for the privilege of reading raw files from a new camera. They provide zero positive contribution these days. All of these incumbent tech companies extract rents on algorithms written decades ago. This needs to end. I am very excited for AI to get adva…

> I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over. You are wildly off base. The algorithms aren't difficult or special. They were written by people reading text books for the most part. They are able to sit on an on old algorithm for decades because the DMCA made interoperability and selling cheaper tools like that basically illeg…

Well that's a bit disappointing but i am aware that their are gaps in my knowledge. I had assumed it was the feasibility of competing with an entrenched firm, not lack of access to research texts. I will chat with Chat to learn more about how DMCA applies, thank you.

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

#962

Post by pradn »

navane wrote: post #905
pradn wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's not premature if your crafting an office product in 2025 which sits in a direct line of 30 years of the same word processor.

It's premature in the sense that you need to care about it before you do profiling, which is the usual advice for perf improvements: "you don't know where the hotspots are, so write your code, profile it, and fix the slow bits".

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

#963

Post by miunau »

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.

There are no financial or career incentives to optimise existing, working things in these institutions. The structures which these large companies use are for people working on new things, so that's what we get. Making office faster doesn't create headlines, but a new product that does the same thing somehow will.

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

#964

Post by qwerty456127 »

ralphc wrote: post #752
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…

How much modern security do I need to write & print a term paper or church bulletin on my own computer?

This depends on whether you want to exchange data with other computers using even removable media, let alone the Internet. Also whether you want to use Unicode. In case you only want to hand-type, edit and print a plain English paper right away by dumping plaintext/PostScript/PCL to LPT you probably are fine with any computer you can find. It's just nobody is using standalone computers anymore, almost every modern computer is a network device.

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

#965

Post by hinkley »

whyoh wrote: post #161
hinkley wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a vague recollection of that being related to embedded browsers in apps, and I think it was related to performance not child processes for unknown client apps.

That's not Edge the browser, but a separate app called Edge WebView2.

Mmm. It was definitely a problem with IE but you did in fact say Edge.

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

#966

Post by dspillett »

gpderetta wrote: post #572
dspillett wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How bad the search features in outlook and teams are, is part of the reason I don't bother trying Bing. If you can't get local search right, global search is going to suck too.

They are completely unrelated teams (or at least used to). Might as well be different companies.

Aye, I was being at least a little facetious. The team of indexing global content is quite different to that of searching my local mail and chat logs. The various "English language search" features attempted for SQL Server are different again.

But they are still all search functions, and the Outlook & Teams search functions seem so terrible that you'd think they'd try do something about it to support the pubic view of their other search related efforts.

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

#967

Post by LuciOfStars »

ryandrake wrote: post #805
MisterTea wrote: post #697

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. Indeed. I am sure many of us here are burnt out on bloat. I am also sure many of us want to move to smaller stuff but cant simply because of industry momentum. BUT that doesn't mean the dream is dead, only that we must work towards those goals on our own time. I found Plan 9 and haven't looked back. I can…

And just when we think we can't make software any more inefficient, slow, and bloated, they release things like Electron, where you ship an entire browser with your app! And then when we think it can't even get worse, we have Docker and containers where we ship the entire OS with the application. I'm looking forward to when app developers ship you an entire computer in the mail to run their text editor.

Electron is horrid, but as a user, I prefer bloated "apps" to no support at all.

As for your second point: [1]

1: https://snapcraft.io/

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

#968

Post by LuciOfStars »

zero_bias wrote: post #760
zer00eyz wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can... The problem isn't "engineering" the problem is the culture of product management. (Note: NOT product managers per se). I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out unused features"? If you can find one, it will end up being the exception that proves the rule. The culture of "add",…

> I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out unused features"? Google goes a step further and kills entire apps

Moment of silence for Play Music. YT Music isn't any less awful now than it was a decade ago.

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

#970

Post by Twirrim »

amiga386 wrote: post #379
alliao wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_o... Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it, will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice will load the printer settings for the document, which means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout. Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documen…

I don't recall spreadsheets ever having any visible printer formatting until the point at which you print them? So surely it's not even a case of "even if you don't want to print it"?
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