Apple is doing something revolutionary with the next release of its OS X operating system. Rather than add new features or show off a fancy new interface or “skin,” they’re going to hone the sucker’s speed. I’m blown away!
The next release of OS X is version 10.6, dubbed Snow Leopard. What Apple is doing with this operating system is tuning up the software. They’re adding no new features. Instead, the programmers are going to review thousands of lines of code and optimize it. The end result will be a faster, leaner operating system.
I would love to see such a thing happen on the PC side. In fact, it was once common: many developers would forgo the lust for new product features and instead concentrate on speed and optimization. WordPerfect for DOS as famous for doing this: up until version 5, each new release of WordPerfect was faster than the previous one.
Making software faster should make sense, but such an effort is an uphill battle; in most companies, sales is in the driver’s seat, not engineering. Salespeople don’t appreciate optimization as much as they crave new splashy features. Optimizing code takes time and, arguably, with faster hardware and more RAM, such efforts seem futile when compared with flashy new features that don’t improve performance but merely add bullet-points to the side of the software box.
I would like to think that the customer prefers speed over features. Yet it’s been so long since any major software company has offered speed improvements. Only occasionally will a new release of some game go for performance over features. But even that is rare.
Imagine if Microsoft were driven by the coders and not the sales beast. What would have happened if Windows Vista was merely an optimized, faster version of Windows XP? My guess is the same thing that will happen when Snow Leopard is released: people will upgrade in droves.
Absolutely, 100% agree with you. Microsoft has touted the “faster load speed” of each of their operating system versions but in Vista’s case it’s a gimmick–they use a “hibernation” mode that boots up quickly afterward but is not an actual boot sequence, and doesn’t affect overall performance at all.
Comment by jamh51 — June 21, 2008 @ 12:10 am
Microsoft has been sensitive to boot times for quite a while. Back in “the day of DOS” I remember boot taking up to 90 seconds, longer if you automatically started the Windows shell. Since then they’ve been big on making startup time faster. Oddly enough, they stop the timer when the desktop appears, but as any Windows user knows that isn’t really when you can actually start using Windows.
One of my computer heroes, Jef Raskin, demonstrated a computer he designed that boasted an extremely quick on-time. I believe it’s described in his book The Humane Interface. He seemed to imply that it was no big deal to get a computer up and running quickly and was puzzled why some operating systems took so long to start.
Comment by admin — June 21, 2008 @ 6:16 am
I definitely would like faster software. But does speed really matter to most users, whom (I expect, considering myself to be an average user) spend most of the day working with just a few applications? And when your competitor is churning out new features, I guess that there aren’t many advantages to saying that the software does the same thing the previous version did, only faster. It might be ok for an OS market (after 10+ years with computers, I recently tried Ubuntu for the first time, before running back to Windows – people might be reluctant to make an OS switch), but I guess it won’t ever be feasible for an applications company.
And paying for it? Would a company spend on upgrading just for the speed? I suspect they’d wait for the next version to roll out, which would have new features plus the optimized code.
Comment by sriksrid — June 21, 2008 @ 9:47 pm
I believe there is an answer to your question: the answer is Vista! One of the main complaints is that it’s slow. Rather than optimize code, Microsoft has continued to pack in feature after feature, without removing anything antique. In fact, one of the reasons that Vista is so slow is that they force compatibility with all prior versions of Windows. So when you load an old Windows program, Vista checks it to see which DLLs to load (and so on). That adds overhead. Now consider had Vista been optimized for only newer hardware and speed. I believe people would have flocked to it. That’s just me, though.
Comment by admin — June 21, 2008 @ 9:56 pm
The perception that Apple is putting out there (“We’re ONLY working on speed improvements”) appeals dramatically to people like me who understand what optimizing code is like, vs. adding features. So even if Microsoft HAD done some speed optimizations, they lost any marketing advantage by not stressing those and diluting their message with all the new features. In a perverse way, adding those other features hurt their marketing message.
Comment by jamh51 — June 23, 2008 @ 1:01 pm