Wednesday 23 April 2008

Bloat grows more than PC speed

According to Infoworld, Microsoft Office is getting more bloated.

Bloat is not a problem by itself - everything that is written in a high level language is basically bloat. The amount of bloat is determined not only by the programmer, but also by the decision process that leads to the next product release. How important is performance in the sales process? Does the organization provide an environment that makes high-performance solutions possible?

If you want to create software that has good performance, start by asking your boss if he wants the application to perform well. If the answer is yes, the next question will be "how well?". Be prepared to answer questions about costs and benefits.

If it doesn't make economically sense to remove bloat, you need to spend your time on something more valuable. Fortunately for me, I work in a company that considers the user experience to be very important :-)

1 comment:

Fernando Madruga said...

I think that that article is a bit "screwed". If it's only 12 times more memory and 3 times "slower" in 7 years, then, even if Office 2007 had nothing new to it, it would be on par with computer and price evolution. You can buy a computer 3 times faster with 12 times more memory now than 7 years ago and it will probably even cost you half as much...

Now, if they were talking about WINDOWS VISTA, *THAT* is a nice piece of useless bloat! As for Office 2007, it starts as fast as 2003 if not faster on my 3 year old PC with only 1 GB RAM (but with Windows XP!), and it *DOES* have some very cool features...

As soon as you get past the change resistance factor and get used to the ribbons, you'll see how much faster you get work done! And the whole suit looks more "polished" than ever, and with some very cool features such as Excel's new tables: you can now treat independent sections of a single spreedsheet as separate tables each with it's own drop-downs for filtering just that table and no more cells and much more...