Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

Perceived bloat and technical debt

• Many see Office’s slow startup as a symptom of decades of accreted code, backward-compatibility hacks and “just add another abstraction/VM” thinking.
• Several argue Microsoft has little incentive to optimize: the CPU/RAM cost is paid by customers, and performance only matters until it threatens the monopoly.
• There’s nostalgia for Office 97–2003: smaller, faster, and (for many) feature-complete for typical use. Some still run these versions and note they launch instantly on modern hardware.
• Preloading on boot is framed as “moving the problem”: instead of fixing inefficiency, Microsoft hides latency in startup.

Climate, ESG and forced obsolescence

• Commenters call out the contrast between Microsoft’s carbon/energy messaging in Windows settings and decisions like preloading Office or ending Windows 10 support, which they see as driving premature hardware replacement.
• Several describe this as greenwashing: optimizing PR, not energy use.

Startup impact and “preload” design

• Many recall this technique from Office 97’s Startup Assistant, Vista’s Superfetch, and similar tricks in LibreOffice, Chrome, Edge, and Adobe products.
• Some accept speculative preloading if Office is used heavily and RAM is abundant, but only if it’s genuinely idle, delayed, and easily disabled.
• Others hate the pattern entirely, pointing out that many apps already install hidden startup tasks, gradually degrading boot and responsiveness.

User experience with modern Office

• People report Word and Excel struggling with modest documents (e.g., 150+ pages, tracked changes, moderately large spreadsheets), with noticeable lag and CPU spikes.
• Outlook’s slowness, crashes, odd quoting behavior, and weak search are frequent pain points.
• Copilot UI clutter, OneDrive/SharePoint pushes, and aggressive cloud integration are pushing some long-time users toward alternatives or frozen older versions.

Alternatives and platform shifts

• Alternatives mentioned: LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, Softmaker, Google Workspace, Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote, org-mode/Emacs, and plain-text + Pandoc workflows.
• Many describe abandoning Office (and sometimes Windows) for Linux or macOS, citing better perceived responsiveness and less background meddling—though others report smooth, fast Windows 10/11 experiences, especially on clean personal machines.

Broader critique of software culture

• The thread generalizes beyond Microsoft: modern software is seen as uniformly bloated, network-bound, and over-engineered, with performance sacrificed to velocity, feature count, telemetry, and AI add-ons.
• Several argue that the cumulative productivity loss from slow tools dwarfs the development savings, but few large orgs treat performance or startup cycles as first-class metrics.