In some ways we've traded speed for productivity.
This tweet is an interesting visual that makes the same point: https://twitter.com/TheoVanGrind/status/888850519564984322
Let's not forget we've drastically increased security by writing applications in safer languages.
Oh, and newer applications tend to support a far wider variety of devices types, displays, inputs, etc.
Developers definitely be investing a lot more effort into improving the status-quo, but it's unfair to claim stuff is slower without improvements.
I claimed no such thing. You're arguing against a statement I never made. Isn't that what's called a straw man argument?
I can't comment on most of the Office suite, but Excel evolved quite a bit since 95. Tables, PowerBI, Apps for Office, etc... If your needs are basic enough then even VisiCalc will do the job, but new features do make an impact for more demanding users.
So, the reasoning is that UI is fundamentally the same (or worse if not done right) to native UI from the 90's, yet it hasn't had a massive speed increase which seems wasteful.
But modern UI in Office is only an evolution of what was there in the 90s and hasn't changed fundamentally either yet it doesn't feel any faster.
UI is only a small part of an app, a well designed app will have most of the work performed outside of the UI thread and it shouldn't feel any slower than a native implementation. My thoughts are rendering speed isn't the issue but application design.
Sure, and Office in the 90s didn't feel any faster than the word processing I was doing on an Apple II+ in middle school. This is because the people buying (and building) software care about other things than processor efficiency. If it's generally fast enough for their normal use, they won't switch to a competitor.
The notion of "wasteful" here is in terms of something like RAM usage or processor instructions. But the correct measure is user time, including the number of user hours of labor needed to buy the device. The original Apple II cost 564 hours of minimum wage labor, and you were up over 1000 hours if you wanted a floppy drive and a decent amount of RAM. Today, a low-end netbook costs 28 hours of minimum wage labor.
Suppose you managed to put on that netbook something with the efficiency of Apple Writer or Office 4.0. Would anything be better? No, because the spare cycles and RAM would go unused. They would be just as wasted. No significant number of user hours would be saved. Or, alternatively, the in-theory cheaper computer they could buy would save them very few working hours.
As long as the user experience is as good, then the hardware notion of "wasteful" is a theoretical, aesthetic value, not a practical one.
Evolution of a UI isn't as important as evolution of the features the UI exposes. As for whether it feels any faster, depends on what you're doing. To give an example, Excel functions can be calculated using multiple CPU cores, which AFAIK wasn't a feature of Excel in the 1990s. You'll only see that speed up if you've working with a large enough volume of formulas. Measuring speed by UI speed alone doesn't get you very far.
All that being said, you won't find me disagreeing with the fact that desktop apps are bloated (web apps even more so). I've experienced responsive desktop apps running on a 7.14MHz CPU. The fact that we've thrown away most of the hardware improvements since the 1980s should be clear to anyone paying attention.
Sorry, but this is absolutely untrue. The Ribbon UI introduced in Office 2007 was a massive change functionally and visually. You went from a static toolbar that would just show and hide buttons to live categories which not only resize but change their options and layout as you customize or resize the window. There's now drop downs, input fields built in, live previews in the document as you hover over tools and options, and more.
Same for the new Backstage UI introduced in Office 2013 for saving files, viewing recents, and other file and option operations. You have full screen animations and interactions.
Hell, Microsoft even made the text cursor fade in and out instead of blinking, which needs more processing power.
Could Microsoft have optimized it more? Yes. But they definitely have added tons to it since the 90s and even mid-00's to justify why it's slower.
There are lots of things they could do. Linking data between spreadsheets or between excel and powerpoint sucks (a significant part of the user base needs to prepare decks and reports that contain lots of charts and numeric tables).
They could learn from Apple's approach with numbers where a worksheet is a canvas on which you can place multiple tables or charts or diagrams, which makes a lot more sense than the single grid per worksheet approach (think having to display two tables one above the other, you are forced to align columns of different widths, and how does the top table overflow?).
Users who need to script or create UDF are stuck with a VB6 editor that hasn't seen any update in 20y and an antiquated language.
I could continue the list for a while. These are basic core features. There might be 1000 people in the world who use power BI, and only because their IT dept set it up for them. But millions of users who's life would be made easier with the suggestions I made above.
You can do this with Excel also. When was the last time you used Excel?
> "There might be 1000 people in the world who use power BI, and only because their IT dept set it up for them."
The Power BI features in Excel come ready to use out of the box. Clearly you've never used them, but they're by far the best new features in modern Excel. Any power user of Excel that isn't exploring them is missing out.
Numerous similar apps depending on what online platform you prefer.
VisiCalc is the first spreadsheet program:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
The point I'm making by bringing up VisiCalc is, if your needs are basic enough, any spreadsheet program will do the job, even the first one. You'll only understand why the more modern desktop spreadsheet programs are more advanced if you have a reason to use the newer features.
This is what gets lots on most people.
The power users create some "nifty" spreadsheet that runs some "important" piece of a business. That "nifty" spreadsheet now requires Microsoft Excel and forces everybody in the company to have a copy if they want access to it.
