alt Hacker NewsAnd to think that the "old" Outlook's splash screen is there for a reason: it used to take a while to open before SSDs became commonplace! Windows in general used to be usable on HDDs; SSDs would blow everyone's pants off making everything open instantly. These days we have 20+ Gbps SSDs without the AHCI latency tax and they're no longer enough to open an e-mail.
THAT'S how low the ball has been dropped.
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Personally that's why I think 'async' in most languages is a farce - it could've never occured to 90s programmers, as back then applications frequently swapped out parts of their program code and state onto the disk - and there's no 'async' to save you from that.
Nowadays disks are fast, but a lot of apps are heavy - your Electron-based webapp is hundreds of megs of binary - there's no saving you from having to load that the same way. In fact most likely your app will have less assets to load than the sum of binaries.
It's not just Windows. It's everything Microsoft.
What steams my clams is that I can press Reply in Outlook and be halfway through the first sentence of my message before the reply window even opens. (M4 Pro)
Almost every time I use Outlook, I have to rewrite my first sentence because half of it was typed before Outlook was finished doing whatever it does in the background. This doesn't happen with other mail clients on the same machine.
It's not 1982 with 8 character keyboard buffers. I shouldn't be able to type faster than a computer can handle the input.
Why this enshittification…
I also see this bad design pattern - tried to clone an outlook calendar event, a meeting with a teams link it that I need repeatedly at sporadic new times (thus can not set it up as repeating).
Outlook native is unable to do that - I am then forced to use Teams to clone the event, likely because Teams need a new meeting id - but why the f••• is Outlook native not able to do that (oh - it’s a webthing).
Too bad they are making changes for the sake of changes (and $$$) in stead of user needs …
Easier and faster software development frameworks have made it cheaper to ship garbage software. Nobody really knows how to measure software quality, but agile development makes it very easy to measure software quantity, so that is what companies prioritize.
It's why AI-driven development isn't actually yielding better products even though it makes developers more efficient. It's just being used to pump out garbage faster.
If I were a trillionaire I'd buy Apple and Microsoft and force all their engineers to use spinning rust on everything.
No SSDs would be allowed anywhere except in the "does going fast break it" test room.
Anyone above VP would be required to have 5400 RPM rust.