Star Benchmarking Microsoft Word From 95 To 2007
Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Wed 23rd Jul 2008 14:32 UTC, submitted by ahz1
Benchmarks Andrew Ziem takes a close look at Microsoft Word performance in a benchmark with 4500 measurements in 5 categories covering 6 versions and 12 years of releases to determine whether Word has become slower or faster over the years.
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Good article; obvious conclusion
by acamfield on Wed 23rd Jul 2008 14:59 UTC
acamfield
Member since:
2006-11-17

Basically says what a lot of us know anecdotally. My current desktop at home has quad core processor with 4GB of RAM, but I spend a lot of time watching programs load. Funny how programs used to snap up on the screen on my old 286-20 running windows 3.11. Ain't progress wonderful?

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Kroc Member since:
2005-11-10

No Word 6.0 in the list, my favourite version :'(

For office buffs, who want to see the bloat increase over the years visually, you simply must check out Jenson Harris' articles on the history of office

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/03/29/563938.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx

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Doc Pain Member since:
2006-10-08

Funny how programs used to snap up on the screen on my old 286-20 running windows 3.11.


Or GeoWorks Ensemble as a complete desktop solution started from DOS. :-)

Ain't progress wonderful?


It's just a question how you want to understand "progress"; as it may be concluded from the article, "progress" means to have features implemented step by step that could have existed years before (or have been existing in free / open source applications years before) while you need to update your OS and your hardware to keep the same "usage speed" - I may use this tern to illustrate how users "feel" the speed of their applications, and because this may be a very individual feeling, benchmarks are welcome.

As I write here: http://www.osnews.com/permalink?309755

hardware ressources
---------------------------------- = overall usage speed
application requirements

Due to technical development, the numerator increases, and due to bloat, the denominator increases, too. The quotient seems to stay the same over the years. Yesterday's applications are as fast on yesterdays machines as today's applications are on today's machines. To benefit of the faster hardware of today, you seem to need to run older software on it. Simple math. :-)

I think this benchmark is (at least) interesting when you want to predict how future versions will behave on future OSes and future hardware.

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