Yeah, I'm honestly trying to figure out why this is getting so much attention. Applications setting themselves to start up at login in order to avoid doing a bunch of work when they're asked for later is one of the oldest patterns in Windows. It's annoying to regularly have to go in and clear out new startup applications, but it's been part of maintaining a Windows machine for decades, and Microsoft Office is hardly the worst offender.
Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?
> Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?
Probably because it is horrible? It's indicative of how we spend less time optimizing code than we do coming up with computationally expensive, inefficient workarounds.
Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office (I made that number up). Why should Office be partially loaded the other 98% of the time? How is it acceptable to use those resources?
When are we actually going to start using the new compute capabilities in our machines, rather than letting them get consumed by unoptimized, barely decent code?
> Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office
I don't know about a "hypothetical" user, but I'd bet a "mean" (corporate) user probably uses office all day long. Hell, I've lost count of the number of e-mails I've seen having a screenshot which is inside a word document for some reason, or the number of excel files which are just a 5x4 table.
Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?