Word VS. OOo 2.0 Writer beta

rapskat

As a professional writer myself I can say that startup times are entirely irrelevant. Only geeks get obsessed about trivial benchmarks like that.

As an aside... I used to do a lot of reviewing for various UK IT magazines. There was one US mag that had recently established itself in the UK and had built its 'labs' with great fanfare. Before then, we humble reviewers would devise our own methods for testing the speed of a machine, such as playing MS Flight Simulator for an hour and seeing how many times we crashed. Besides, hardly anyone cared much about speed then. But the publishers of PC magazines decided they would get an edge by creating labs, staffed by mirthless wireheads with clipboards, that could spew out reams of authoritative data on system performance. These benchmarks would then be used by manufacturers in their ads (paying for the privilege, of course). My job on this mag was to have a play with a bunch of PCs, so that I could wibble on about how shoddy the power switch was and how much I liked that particular shade of cream, and then take the benchmarks and say something meaningful about them.

I would analyse the results carefully and write "they're all pretty much as fast as each other", at which point the editor would turn apoplectic and rage, "no, no, no - look at this result - this machine runs this dBase benchmark two thousandths of a second faster than this machine." I'd hunch my shoulders. "Yeah? So?" Smoke would appear from the editor's ears. "This is *important*. We spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on these labs. These f***ing geeks are costing us a fortune every month and they don't even *wash*. Our whole existence is to serve the benchmarks."

The editor would usually faint, or resign, at this point. But in all the time I wrote these reviews, I never saw a significant different between two PCs of similar spec and price range. Maybe the occasional machine might have had a slight edge in intensive applications. But these mags were mostly aimed at the home-hobbyist user where PCs spend the vast majority of their time waiting for the damned owner to *do something*.

So, when people crow that this app loads two seconds faster than that one, my only reaction is to think 'so what?' and dismiss them as another pointless nerd who likes talking about software rather than using it to do things. Personally, the time it takes OOo to load is irrelevant because:

a) I'm usually doing other things while it's loading anyway. b) Given that it's my most important application, it's hardly ever not running anyway. c) I'll use that app for hours at a stretch, so a couple of seconds delay at the start is neither here nor there. It's like complaining that your aircraft was two minutes late in departing. By the time you arrive at your destination, seven hours later, are you still bothered by those two minutes? d) I could go on forever about how much I prefer OOo to Word - about how it doesn't think it's smarter than me, doesn't keep getting in the way, produces leaner files, and ... well, the point is, it's a far better tool, for me, for actually getting things done, and as I get paid for getting things done, that's important.

That was quite a rant, wasn't it?