Comment by mnl
4 years ago
I find it striking that a decent modern laptop would have been a supercomputer 20 years ago, when people used Office 97 that was feature complete already IMO. I can't help this constant cognitive dissonance with modern software; do we really need supercomputers to move Windows out of the box?
We need some extra processing power to support larger screens and refresh rates. Arguably, security benefits of managed code / sandboxing are worth it - but the runtimes seem to be pretty-well optimized. Other than that, I don't see anything reasonable to justify the low performance of most software.
Uh, yah 4k, etc but most of the modern machines are still 1920x1080@60hz. Which is only 8% larger than 1600x1200 which wasn't an uncommon resolution in the late 1990's, usually running at 75Hz or better over analog vga cables. So its actually _LESS_ bandwidth, which is why many of us cried about the decade+ of regression in resolution/refresh brought on by the LCD manufactures deciding computer monitors weren't worthy of being anything but overpriced TV screens. Its still ongoing, but at least there are some alternatives now.
It is possible to get office97 (or for that matter 2003, which is one of the last non sucky versions) and run it on a modern machine. It does basically everything instantly, including starting. So I don't really think resolution is the problem.
PS, I've had multiple monitors since the late 80's too, in various forms, in the late 1990's driving multiple large CRTs at high resolution from secondary PCI graphics cards, until they started coming with multiple ports (thanks matrox!) for reasonable prices.
I'd imagine software is bloated and grown until is it still-just-about usable on modern hardware. Making it faster there is probably seen as premature optimisation.
I'd imagine perhaps this is how product teams are assessed - is the component just-about fast enough, and does it have lots of features. So long as MS Office is the most feature-rich software package, enterprise will buy nothing else, slow or not.
It doesn't even need to be the most feature-rich any more. Microsoft has figured out that the key is corporate licensing.
Is Teams better than Zoom? No, but my last employer ditched Zoom because Teams was already included in their enterprise license package and they didn't want to pay twice for the same functionality.
It really is feature-complete. And I still use it for writing! Word 97 beats anything else I've tried in both polish and performance.