Optimize load times for Office

Date: 1997

Snippet
From: Bill Gates Sent Tuesday, May 06, 1997 7:06 PM To: Carl Stork; Bill Veght; MArshall Brumer Cc: Aaron Contorer; Mile Porter; Moshe Duine; Jim Allchin; Bull Kruger; Jon DeVann; Steven Sinofsky Subject: RE: Applications boot time

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Office. It must be possible for Office setup to be a lot smarter and effectively get most of the speed up that running this Intel utility provides ..

I have to say given the importance of speeding up boot time for Office and how important this is for Windows, I expect Office to get involved in understanding these speedups. I expect the optimal DLL loading strategy to be well understood.

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From: Carl Stork To: Bill Veghte; Bill Gates; Marshal Brumer Subject: RE: Applications boot time

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I don't think that Intel would agree to an Office-only deal with Microsoft, ore even a Memphis/NT5 & Office deal. If Intel gives us rights to ship this with Office, they'll want to give a license to Corel and to Lotus as well .. Would you allow users to also optimize load times for other apps, or just the Office apps? ..

Intel is willing to give us the utility on an exclusive basis .. the main thing they want in return is attribution ..

Intel's distribution capabilities: Intel of course is very anxious to get credit for their work. If they licensed w/ Office, we would have a harder time preventing them from licensing to everyone under the sun. This has two limitations; positioning Intel as a great sw company, mitigating the amount of "benefit" accrued directly to MS ..

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From: Aeal Bahaa-El-Din Sent: Thursday MAy, 01 1997 12:42 PM To: Bob Fitzgerald; Jon DeVann cc: David Fields; Stephen Hsiao; Bill Gates

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David Fields & NTW perf team wil continue working with the Office people to give them feedback in optimizing for NT as they did with Mark Walker for Word 8.0 to reduce the boot from 13 to 6 seconds in 16MB.

From Bob Fitzgerald

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The reference scattering in windord (probably) means that code was executing during boot in the WinNT perf lab that wasn't getting executed at boot in the Office build lab .. I've done approximations of gang loading - reading all the necessary pages in winword.exe in address order, then all the pages of mso97.dll etc ..

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From: Bill Gates To: Moshe Duine cc: Jon DeVann; Jim Allchin Subject: FW: Applications boot

Can you have someone from NT work with the Office group on this point #1 here?

I think Office boot times are critical to our future and I am pushing for more innovation in this area.

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One goal this will require invention and work with the OS and even rethinking how we use DLLs but I think it's a requirement.

Office feels heavy for a number of reasons but the one you really notice is the applications boot time

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From: Darll Rubin To: Bill Gates; Aaron Contorer Cc: Jim Allchin; Steven Sinofsky; Butler Lampson; Nathan Myhrvold; Rick Rashid

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There are also ways to improve the illusion of startup speed. It should be very easy for an app to put up what looks like the app window and the first page of the document (or even the page the user last visited), even if this is mostly smoke-and-mirrors show until more of the app loads to make it live ..

[comment: "I assume we don't get "polluted" by understanding the Intel algorithms"]

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From: Bill Gates To: Aaron Contorer

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I am hard core about trying to find ways to make our applications boot faster. We have to do it. It's the whole reason people think our applications are too big .. Would it be faster over a 100megabit fairly unloaded Ethernet to get these bits across the network? The idea is basically the Berkeley NOW approach except without the low latency network which makes it such a big win for them ..

Full Exhibit
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