This is a very interesting statement. I've been working with boot times at work recently. In one release, I pulled boot times from ~25 seconds to <7 seconds by

This is a very interesting statement. I've been working with boot times at work recently. In one release, I pulled boot times from ~25 seconds to <7 seconds by going ninja on the kernel and init. The response was out of all proportion. Users liked it so much, talked about 'latency' and 'improved workflow' (none of the software had changed, only the boot time). There is no doubt that startup time is a significant contributing factor to the way users respond to applications/devices. I was musing over all this with a co-worker who expressed no surprise, and told me a story how, back in the 90s, he got a similar response from his users by simply removing the splash screen. Not even reducing startup time. He said people were waiting for the splash screen and when the main window opened, they thought it must have started so quickly they missed it.