5 ms·

I'm not sure how far back you'd consider "modern" but back in 2000, Microsoft Office was unreliable, bloated crap that would occasionally refuse to open, reinst

I'm not sure how far back you'd consider "modern" but back in 2000, Microsoft Office was unreliable, bloated crap that would occasionally refuse to open, reinstall or be repaired; I had to occasionally resort to reinstalling Windows entirely. Adobe Flash would randomly chew up the entire CPU after playing certain applets, even after the browser closed. Browsers? When they crashed, which they did often on some machines, they had no session restore. Boom. Sage Payroll across a network - even a 100Mpbs/switched setup was laughably slow because it would IO bytes at a time. Symantec's antivirus would refuse to update, even on freshly-installed servers. Norton had official instructions on troubleshooting LiveUpdate which included having to unplug the modem to fool it into thinking you were offline. Windows would hang, crash, run like treacle, die if you plugged in a printer, insert a blank CD-R that hadn't been formatted properly. When iTunes first came out? Oh god, one early version broke the Windows Installer somehow, killing all MSIExec-based software in the same way. IME, software is just as bad as it always has been. Microsoft still ignore their own best practices, design guidelines and even user consent recommendations. Electron may be new but it's as efficient as software has always been: insultingly, laughably so. Installing printer drivers seems easier until you realise, three months later that it's pointing to an IP address, not a host name, when it's given a new one. Forced to set up an online account to scan, or even just login to your computer. I don't even have to work on enterprise software which is why I do not have grey hairs :-)

barrenko 5y ago
Agreed, when you look back to early 2k years, we might as well view current age as a renaissance.
baal80spam 5y ago
> back in 2000, Microsoft Office was unreliable, bloated crap that would occasionally refuse to open, reinstall or be repaired I hope you are not describing Office 97 which is widely regarded as the best version of the Office suite. As for being bloated - today's "apps" would like to have a word with you ;)
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Office 2000 was not particularly stable, or fast, and if it managed to corrupt a document in some way, it'd always crash trying to open it.
- hnmullany 5y ago
  Just don't try to use cross document embedding (like putting an excel chart in a word doc) - that would blue screen my PC fairly reliably
- leohonexus 5y ago
  Up till now, MS Outlook still has a Safe Mode with limited functionality that would activate in case normal Outlook won’t boot properly - I think this speaks heaps about their software quality.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    I think most apps with plugins have a safe mode.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  > Office 97 which is widely regarded as the best version Only in retrospect. I was in high school when it came out, and I vaguely remember one of my classmates griping about it being slow and/or bloated.
- proactivesvcs 5y ago
  It still had its complexities but it was markedly more reliable than Office 2000, certainly. It also didn't take three days to install!
YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
Regarding Sage. Sage provide the software for the card reader machines at my local SPAR. Frequently lunch time many of the employees on the tills are waiting for card payments to complete which slows down serving customers. As for the rest. I don't specifically remember many issues with Windows XP, if the install was kept tidy. Symantec was probably the source of your woes and many people used to use AVG.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  When XP came out I remember many people vehemently staying on Windows 2000 since Windows XP just added a bunch of "fisher price bloat". It wasn't until some service pack (SP2?) that people upgraded.
  - YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
    People used to say a lot of nonsense back then. The thing that slowed down XP a lot was ClearType (which was off by default) and the animations. If enabled Windows Classic theme (I forget what it was called) it was as fast as Windows 2000 and looked exactly the same. The other problems that people frequently had was that a lot of software used Win 95/98 only hacks which wouldn't run on XP (or anything NT based).
- proactivesvcs 5y ago
  XP definitely improved with age, any by SP2 was a pretty decent operating system. Other than the fisher-price approach to the GUI and naming schemes I don't have a book of gripes against it :-)
  - YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
    The GUI could be set back to classic Windows quite quickly. There was also the Zune, Royale and Royale Dark (unofficially leaked IIRC) themes that looked nice. XP 64bit (for x64 machines) however was the best Windows OS I've ever used. Fast and super stable. People used to complain about Vista being bad. However that was mainly a problem with 32bit Vista. 64bit Vista was again amazing.
tokai 5y ago
Oh yeah, and buying a video game usually entailed an afternoon of troubleshooting to get it running.
krylon 5y ago
> back in 2000, Microsoft Office was unreliable, bloated crap Sadly, it did not stop there. When I worked as Windows sysadmin / helpdesk monkey, I had to install Windows 2013 on several machines because it just stopped working for no apparent reason. On one machine, an update to Office 2013 broke Autodesk Inventor (by replacing/updating some vbs file, I suspect); reinstalling Inventor kind-of worked, but it caused MS Outlook to crash whenever the user tried to write an email (some might consider this an improvement, but not everyone agrees). Reinstalling Office fixed that without breaking Inventor again. The worst part - from a helpdesk perspective - was that there was no rhyme or reason to it, this type of problem would pop up randomly on some machines, while other machines with practically identical hardware, OS, and applications installed ran perfectly fine.
pizza234 5y ago
I agree with all, but this is a misrepresentation: > Electron may be new but it's as efficient as software has always been: insultingly, laughably so Electron is definitely bloated, but it's possible to write sufficiently fast¹ software like Visual Studio Code. It can't be put on the same basket ("insulting") as Sage Payroll. ¹="sufficiently" fast, not "blazing" fast
- eyegor 5y ago
  As far as I recall, VSCode had to fork electron in order to make it acceptably performant. The team tried to use stock electron but the performance was not good. And they're probably going to move to because electron is still slow and terrible. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/118308 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/118308
  - pizza234 5y ago
    > The team tried to use stock electron but the performance was not good. Can you provide references of this fork? It you actually look at the VSC manifest, you'll find that the vanilla "electron" is a dependency. > And they're probably going to move to because electron is still slow and terrible. I take you haven't used Visual Studio Code. As I wrote, it's certainly not the fastest editor, but it's fast enough for professional usage. It's actually faster (or comparable at least) to other "famous editors". > https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/118308 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/118308 This doesn't have any actual technical content; it's essentially a variation of Rewrite It In Rust.
    - cassianoleal 5y ago
      Much lower memory consumption and startup time cut down to ~50% sound like technical enough reasons to me.
    - eyegor 5y ago
      So I know that currently they use electron, but I vaguely recall them working on a fork of electron to replace chromium etc. across all their products (edge, code, others?). I can't seem to find public references to it related to code, it might have been discussed more in regards to the edgehtml/chakra implementation. I may also be mixing things up, that was around 2015 I think.
Annatar 5y ago

barrenko 5y ago

Agreed, when you look back to early 2k years, we might as well view current age as a renaissance.

baal80spam 5y ago

> back in 2000, Microsoft Office was unreliable, bloated crap that would occasionally refuse to open, reinstall or be repaired I hope you are not describing Office 97 which is widely regarded as the best version of the Office suite. As for being bloated - today's "apps" would like to have a word with you ;)

formerly_proven 5y ago
Office 2000 was not particularly stable, or fast, and if it managed to corrupt a document in some way, it'd always crash trying to open it.
hnmullany 5y ago
Just don't try to use cross document embedding (like putting an excel chart in a word doc) - that would blue screen my PC fairly reliably
leohonexus 5y ago
Up till now, MS Outlook still has a Safe Mode with limited functionality that would activate in case normal Outlook won’t boot properly - I think this speaks heaps about their software quality.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  I think most apps with plugins have a safe mode.
mwcampbell 5y ago
> Office 97 which is widely regarded as the best version Only in retrospect. I was in high school when it came out, and I vaguely remember one of my classmates griping about it being slow and/or bloated.
proactivesvcs 5y ago
It still had its complexities but it was markedly more reliable than Office 2000, certainly. It also didn't take three days to install!

YEwSdObPQT 5y ago

Regarding Sage. Sage provide the software for the card reader machines at my local SPAR. Frequently lunch time many of the employees on the tills are waiting for card payments to complete which slows down serving customers. As for the rest. I don't specifically remember many issues with Windows XP, if the install was kept tidy. Symantec was probably the source of your woes and many people used to use AVG.

kalleboo 5y ago
When XP came out I remember many people vehemently staying on Windows 2000 since Windows XP just added a bunch of "fisher price bloat". It wasn't until some service pack (SP2?) that people upgraded.
- YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
  People used to say a lot of nonsense back then. The thing that slowed down XP a lot was ClearType (which was off by default) and the animations. If enabled Windows Classic theme (I forget what it was called) it was as fast as Windows 2000 and looked exactly the same. The other problems that people frequently had was that a lot of software used Win 95/98 only hacks which wouldn't run on XP (or anything NT based).
proactivesvcs 5y ago
XP definitely improved with age, any by SP2 was a pretty decent operating system. Other than the fisher-price approach to the GUI and naming schemes I don't have a book of gripes against it :-)
- YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
  The GUI could be set back to classic Windows quite quickly. There was also the Zune, Royale and Royale Dark (unofficially leaked IIRC) themes that looked nice. XP 64bit (for x64 machines) however was the best Windows OS I've ever used. Fast and super stable. People used to complain about Vista being bad. However that was mainly a problem with 32bit Vista. 64bit Vista was again amazing.

tokai 5y ago

Oh yeah, and buying a video game usually entailed an afternoon of troubleshooting to get it running.

krylon 5y ago

> back in 2000, Microsoft Office was unreliable, bloated crap Sadly, it did not stop there. When I worked as Windows sysadmin / helpdesk monkey, I had to install Windows 2013 on several machines because it just stopped working for no apparent reason. On one machine, an update to Office 2013 broke Autodesk Inventor (by replacing/updating some vbs file, I suspect); reinstalling Inventor kind-of worked, but it caused MS Outlook to crash whenever the user tried to write an email (some might consider this an improvement, but not everyone agrees). Reinstalling Office fixed that without breaking Inventor again. The worst part - from a helpdesk perspective - was that there was no rhyme or reason to it, this type of problem would pop up randomly on some machines, while other machines with practically identical hardware, OS, and applications installed ran perfectly fine.

pizza234 5y ago

I agree with all, but this is a misrepresentation: > Electron may be new but it's as efficient as software has always been: insultingly, laughably so Electron is definitely bloated, but it's possible to write sufficiently fast¹ software like Visual Studio Code. It can't be put on the same basket ("insulting") as Sage Payroll. ¹="sufficiently" fast, not "blazing" fast

eyegor 5y ago
As far as I recall, VSCode had to fork electron in order to make it acceptably performant. The team tried to use stock electron but the performance was not good. And they're probably going to move to because electron is still slow and terrible. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/118308 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/118308
- pizza234 5y ago
  > The team tried to use stock electron but the performance was not good. Can you provide references of this fork? It you actually look at the VSC manifest, you'll find that the vanilla "electron" is a dependency. > And they're probably going to move to because electron is still slow and terrible. I take you haven't used Visual Studio Code. As I wrote, it's certainly not the fastest editor, but it's fast enough for professional usage. It's actually faster (or comparable at least) to other "famous editors". > https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/118308 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/118308 This doesn't have any actual technical content; it's essentially a variation of Rewrite It In Rust.
  - cassianoleal 5y ago
    Much lower memory consumption and startup time cut down to ~50% sound like technical enough reasons to me.
  - eyegor 5y ago
    So I know that currently they use electron, but I vaguely recall them working on a fork of electron to replace chromium etc. across all their products (edge, code, others?). I can't seem to find public references to it related to code, it might have been discussed more in regards to the edgehtml/chakra implementation. I may also be mixing things up, that was around 2015 I think.

Annatar 5y ago