Tag Archives: Vista

Matt Stein’s Blog and Microsoft’s Mojave Marketing

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Thanks to Shaan Hurley for revealing to the wider world the existence of Ribbon Man Matt Stein’s blog. I’m not sure it’s appropriate for a blogging n00b like myself to welcome somebody with a blog four years older than his own, but I’m going to do it anyway. Welcome, Matt (no pun intended).

Some of Matt’s blog posts (particularly the early ones) make for, er, interesting reading, so don’t click if you’re easily offended. Please bear in mind that this is a personal blog, not an Autodesk one.

Matt and I generally get on fine, but we have had some frank exchanges of view and often agree to disagree. One subject where we are unlikely to share the same views is the Microsoft Vista marketing exercise The Mojave Experiment. This is something I planned to post about some weeks ago but then something more important came up and I didn’t bother. Here’s what Matt thinks, and here’s what I think:

While this is a cute marketing ploy and might convince the terminally naive, it pretty obviously qualifies as propaganda rather than any kind of meaningful study. Here’s how it’s done:

Find a selection of people with no experience of a product but with ignorance-based negative feelings about it. Make sure the hardware and software you’re going to show them all works well. Fix up the settings for minimal annoyance. Present an expensively prepared, well-choreographed demo that presents all the best features and none of the worst. Result: oh wow, what a surprise, it’s better than they thought.

A marketing company could reproduce the same results with practically anything if they set it up right. I bet I could do it with Linux, OS X, Windows Me, whatever. Give me Microsoft’s resources and open slather to present things as fairly or unfairly as I like and I will hand you whatever results you request.

For the record, I don’t hate Vista. I have Vista and XP available, dual boot, on hardware that can easily cope with the demands. In my tests on that hardware, Vista runs AutoCAD significantly faster than XP. Vista has been reliable and it looks nice, but I use XP about 95% of the time. Why? A few minor annoyances, but mostly it’s because Vista doesn’t support my mouse fully. Is that Microsoft’s fault or Logitech’s? Who cares? It’s something I have to put up with when I use Vista, therefore I generally avoid using Vista. As Matt rightly points out, Vista has a lot of minor “nice to have” touches, but all of them added together don’t make it worth putting up with a partially functional mouse. Neither do they make it worth buying a new mouse.

Back to the marketing campaign, it reminds me of a productivity “study” paid for by Autodesk an age ago to show how much more productive Release 13 was than Release 12. It was released, accompanied by a poorly worded and deceptive press release (unintentionally deceptive, supposedly), to hoots of derision from a cynical AutoCAD user community. It convinced almost nobody and angered many, and was, all in all, a spectacularly bad idea.

Autodesk marketing people, if by any chance you’re thinking of repeating that old mistake, or even “doing a Mojave” with AutoCAD 2009, please don’t. Just don’t.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 17 – Ribbon Performance 2

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Testing performance under Vista can be an interesting experience. The trouble is, Vista tries to improve its performance by observing what you do and caching it for later use in case you do it again. This leads to something akin to the observer effect in science, where the very act of observing something has an effect on what it is you are observing.

Every time I test Ribbon tab switching performance in Vista, the results improve. In XP, the worst tab switching time I saw on my Core2 PC was 1.6 seconds for the first exposure of the Tools tab. In Vista, the same thing took 1.2 seconds the first time I tried it, but subsequent attempts (after closing and restarting AutoCAD but not rebooting) gave results in the 0.5 to 0.6 second range.

I tried turning off Vista’s pretty Aero interface and saw improvements of about 0.1 seconds in every measurement. With Aero off and testing a second time, I saw first tab switches from 0.2 to 0.6 seconds and second tab switches between 0.3 and 0.5 seconds. Most switches were around the 0.3 second mark.

While I hesitate to base any firm conclusions on such shaky ground as these rather unscientific tests, I can say this with some confidence: it is possible to have a system running AutoCAD 2009 under Vista where the Ribbon tab switching performance meets in most cases, and is close to meeting in all cases, the 0.3 second mark that most users perceive as instant response. However, your mileage may vary. Correction: your mileage will vary.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 8 – Vista Startup Times

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I’ve now tested startup times of various AutoCAD releases under Vista. Here are the results, alongside the XP results for ease of comparison:

Release First
Startup		 Subsequent
Startup
XP Vista XP Vista
12 8.6 – 8.2 –
13 2.6 1.8 1.3 0.8
14 2.1 – 0.5 –
2002 3.2 2.1 0.6 1.1
2004 – 4.3 – 1.7
2005 – 7.9 – 4.5
2006 14.9 8.7 2.6 4.4
2007 13.8 11.9 3.5 6.6
2008 14.6 10.5 3.6 6.0
2009 28.9 17.3 7.2 13.3

Same caveats as before, plus the following:

  1. Some AutoCAD releases were not installed on both XP and Vista partitions, hence the gaps in the table.
  2. The Vista tests were performed on the same PC as the XP tests.
  3. The system had a 1 GB USB key hanging out the back, giving Vista a theoretical startup benefit over XP.
  4. It’s very difficult to get meaningful performance results out of Vista because its SmartFetch and ReadyBoost technologies are doing their best to improve performance without user intervention. I may be a geek, but I’m not a good enough geek to be able to tell what Vista was doing behind my back during these tests.
  5. Repeated startups of AutoCAD 2009 revealed a gradual improvement in startup performance. Startup times went 17.3, 13.3, 12.5, 12.5, 11.0 seconds.

Make of that what you will. In short, in my tests AutoCAD 2009 startup time in Vista is still roughly double that of its recent predecessors and about ten times longer than older releases like R13 and 2002.