She finally got too fat for me.
In her day, she was hot and sleek, and what she did for me just rocked my world. And she was dedicated, too, keeping the outside world at bay, making sure my little kingdom stayed clean and neat.
But then the bloat set in, the endless fashion updates, the high maintenance, and the complaining. Always with the complaining about needing this or that, always phoning home to her mom, wanting something, checking something, and none of it made sense to me even though I thought I knew her well.
So in the end, I divorced her. And you should see the tight little number I picked up as a trophy! Smokin’ hot!
Oh. What did you think I was talking about? It’s my anti-virus software, silly! My nearly two decade marriage to Norton AntiVirus just ended. Took up with this fast as blazes, written in assembly language, NOD32. Boy, am I glad I did, too.
I was on the Internet before there was an Internet, when it was the old ARPANET defense network. The smiley/emoticon just celebrated its 25-year anniversary, invented by a prof at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982, and, dudes and dudettes, I WAS THERE.
I bought the very first edition of Norton AntiVirus when it came out. 
That was in the days when you could put a GUI-based word processor or drawing software on a single 400K 3.5″ floppy (MacWrite and MacPaint). Heck the entire MacOS fit on such a disk. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?
How could they pull off that magic? Back then, software developers wrote super-tight code. These were guys who fretted over bits, folks. Not a spare piece of junk instruction anywhere in that code.
But just ten years later, one version of WordPerfect had part of a Utah phone book compiled into the software so the programmers didn’t have to look up the number for the local pizza place while they were grinding out the latest version. At least that’s what the urban legend says. I don’t doubt it’s true, given how uselessly bloated software became.
Norton AntiVirus went from a tight piece of code to a bloated mess over the years, with dozens of background processes bogging down my computer. NAV isn’t alone in this, either. I think Microsoft only made Word worse after Mac version 4.1, which I considered the pinnacle of that software. Heck, you could run it off a 1.44 MB floppy! How many gigs does it take to install Word now? I think they invented the Blu-Ray DVD just to hold what MS Office has bloated into.
So I miss those days when programmers actually sweated ways to condense their babies onto 1.44 MB floppies to run in 1 MB of RAM. Bloatware didn’t—couldn’t—exist.
Now, few care.
Eset, the manufacturer of my new anti-virus software, NOD32, must be those old school guys, because they wrote the code as if they were trying to squeeze it onto a floppy. It runs at mach speed, too, with my computer starting up almost twice as fast now that it doesn’t have to load process after process dedicated to Norton AntiVirus bloat.
I’ve divorced or cheated on other past loves, too.
I’d used Eudora for e-mail from the days when it was still a free program offered by the University of Illinois, but I bolted to Thunderbird because of that program’s extensibility, something Qualcomm forgot in the development process after they took over Eudora. Though I hated making the switch (I’d been using Eudora since the 1980s), it had to be done. I bolted from Internet Explorer the second Firefox became available, too. Never liked the fact that Microsoft products all talked with each other. Seemed to me to be too open for hacker attacks. Hackers thought so, too.
A few think online apps are the answer to this, but I don’t like the trend at all. I prefer buying a piece of software off the shelf then running it for a decade. I get my money’s worth that way. Some of these new Web-based apps want to charge you by the month, so by the time the year’s over, you’ve spent twice what it would have cost you to buy the same software off the shelf PLUS you’ve gotta keep paying. I’m still using the version of MS Word that came out in 2000. I can’t begin to imagine how many thousands of dollars I would’ve spent in the last seven years if Microsoft took Office online and ran it on a subscription model.
No, I won’t be buying into that throw-money-at-the-Internet subscription model.
I do like that some programs are slimming down. People got tired of bloatware. I’ve never understood why most programs aren’t modular to the point of allowing the user to selectively install every function he needs. I’m not talking about add-ons, but core functionality. Honestly, I use probably a quarter of what MS Word can do. To me, the rest of it is just clutter and bloat. Should I some day need one more piece of functionality, I should be able to install just that one piece, but software companies just don’t get this.
Apps that thrash your hard drive? Very bad for notebook users. Apps with 5,000 pre-loaded functions? Very bad for newbies and cranky old guys like me. Apps that run a dozen processes in the background? Very bad for everyone.
Not many sleek, die-by-the-bit programs out there anymore, especially for Windows-based systems. Some Mac programmers still go for tight, but even then, not as many as in olden days.
So yeah, I cheat on some of my software, looking for something sexier, faster, and tighter. I’m proud of it, too. Because when you find that perfect app, let me tell you, it’s like love at first sight.
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Honestly, you’re such a geek.
My first PC was a Kaypro II. It ran CP/M, on a 4mhz processor and a whopping 64k of ram, came with two single density 5 1/4″ floppy drives that ran everything I needed (No hard drive!). I even had Wordstar 1.0! All in a metal case that included a 9″ CRT, keyboard, and a handle. An early, uh, laptop? 26 pounds, but, hey, what do you want for $1595?
When one thinks about the changes that have occured in the last 25 years, I wonder what has really improved, and then I go back to a dialup internet connection and realize that the good old days, while dynamic and revolutionary, can’t hold a candle to what is available now.
The problem that has come is the lack of concern for the future. “Get it out NOW!” is steamrolling over “But what if…?” Not to mention elitism amongst techies that causes serious issues for the uninitiated.
There’s a moral in this somewhere…
Something to think about when thinking about 25 years going by…That the $1595 my Kaypro cost in 1982, adjusted for inflation, would be over $3500 today…
…but my annual income, also adjusted for inflation, is almost exactly the same…
David,
I sold computers back at the time the Mac came out, and I sold the first Compaq. People bought those Compaq portables in droves. They were built like tanks. You could drop one, running, out the back of a speeding truck and it would still be working when you retrieved it. In fact, the founder of Compaq used to do something similar when he presented the machine at tech shows. Now try to say that about any of today’s notebooks.
Yeah, product cycles stink. In the cell phone market, I don’t think a model has more than a five month lifespan. Rushing stuff to market only makes for crappy products. Nearly everything in the tech market today is a mere shadow of the kind of quality you found back in the day.
Joel Spolsky, a New York software developer, posted an article about this a couple of days ago. It’s fairly lengthy and technical, but an interesting prediction of the direction software will likely take.
The summary: historically, companies that added software features with wild abandon survived, whereas companies that focused on tight efficiency (e.g. assembly-coded) died. The reason was that hardware advances (more GHz, more GB) proceeded at a faster rate than the time to craft highly-efficient software.
That’s the highly-simplified vesion. Read the article if you’re interested in the details.
The common thread in your post is usability, the user experience. Joel’s blog, Joel on Software, has a lot of good material on what makes using a piece of software a wonderful or horrible experience.
Stephen,
Joel’s right, but he’s wrong. Yes, more RAM and faster processor speeds still allow sloppy coding to run faster.
But there’s a hidden conceit: Every company thinks it can get away with sloppy coding without ever asking how their program will fare with the other guy’s sloppy app.
You open your new PC with Vista and it runs pretty darned snappy out of the box. Now load it up with all the bloated software you run. Ooh. What happened to that snappiness? Now you sit and wait as two hundred background process fight for CPU time on top of the foreground processes you’re running.
And all because no one takes the time to write decent code.
See, sloppy can only work if you’re the only one who’s sloppy. When EVERYONE is sloppy, then your house looks like a garbage dump and smells like it, too.
And that’s the modern PC bloated with orphaned registry entries, bits of DLL detritus, and the flotsam and jetsam of bad programming techniques clogging up the drain. And only God knows what all that junk is. Remove one wrong file and you’re spending a whole weekend re-installing Windows.
It shouldn’t be that way.
Stephen,
One last thing:
It took NOD32, written in assembler, 45 minutes to check both my hard drives. It took NAV, not written in assembler, 5.25 HOURS to check ONE hard drive.
To me, that’s a distinct value added proposition! Yes, I’ll take the assembler!
I agree that I will never pay a subscription fee to use apps over the internet. However, there’s some pretty decent internet apps out there that are free (right now). Of course, there’s all the Google stuff (Google Docs, etc.), and it’s free.
But, if you’d like to get away from the Google steam roller, you might go check out http://www.zoho.com . Zoho’s got a ton of really neat apps (word, presentation, spreadsheet, planner, notebook, project mgmt., wiki, database, etc.) and they are mostly all free – with free online storage and organization of all the different resulting files (backupable to your desktop). You can do some upgrades on some of their apps, for $$$, but mostly they’re free and not crippled. And I think nicer than Google’s stuff.
Peace out
Brad,
Something tells me all these free online apps aren’t going to be free forever. Plus, privacy issues and the reality of storing your private docs on someone else’s system doesn’t thrill me, either.
I wonder how many companies have fallen into the online apps trap, and then found that their docs are useless when the internet connection is no longer available. We think of the internet like phones or electricity, and it’s not…The internet might be uninterruptable, but that doesn’t mean access to the internet is uninterruptable…
If we want a nightmare economic scenario, consider that the destruction of 6 or so particular buildings in the US would bring our economy to a standstill, or that a widespread, targeted, denial-of-service attack could cripple most internet providers.
And when Google or Zoho decide to start charging for upgrades and storage, can you imagine the conversion issues? Like drugs, it starts cheap, until you are dependant…
I think we should go back to pencil and paper, and stop trying to be so productive. (He types on his 3.0 gHz Dell, connected to a 6Mb pipe… and wilfing)
Its actually 1 building on the east coast (non-government)…
I hate this Norton. It has ruined my computer. Instead of fixing the virus my computer picked up, Norton told me to go in and fool around with the registry. So now I have to do a complete revovery on my computer which means right now I am madly saving everything since I will lose everything in that procedure. After I get back to normal I will download my free McAfee through AOL which I had before and had no problems with it.
Diane,
Ooh, very bad. You should’ve asked me about your problem first.
I don’t recommend McAfee, either. Same bloatware as Norton. Look into the NOD32 thing.
Dan,
Can you help a brother out? I’m tired of trying to diagnose my PC problems not knowing what one little click might cause to happen. Lately I’ve been thinking about a Mac. What do you think? I’m not too tech savy, but I trust you’ll shoot straight with me.
Albert,
As someone who worked for Apple, I say yes. You won’t regret it.
Dan,
I have been using NOD 32 for a couple of years. It is significantly less intrusive on the system. Great decision.
Jon
Jon,
“Significantly less” is an understatement.
I checked out the site. I may try NOD32 when my current Norton subscription runs out. I like the fact that I can buy a 4 multiuser pack for about 25 USD per computer.
Laura,
I looked at NOD32 almost a year ago, right after I updated my NAV subscription and had some problems. I was waiting till mid-October for the subscription to expire, but NAV stopped downloading updates a couple weeks ago and I got a message telling me this. When I tried to do a manual download, the process froze and gave me an error saying something was corrupted in one of the files. I clicked on the error message, which took me to instructions how to fix the problem automatically. But the fix screen came up saying the fix only worked in IE. At that point, I downloaded NOD32 and uninstalled NAV.
Best thing I’ve done for my PC in ages.
I think NOD32 can be wildly successful mainly because no one wants to think about viruses, spyware, firewalls, and other security issues. I need to use Microsoft Word since so many documents are available only in that format. So I put up with the bloatedness. But I do not want to spend a long time letting NAV or Spybot or anything else check my hard drive. At least MS Word lets me do something productive. NAV is not productive. It protects my productivity. Big diff.
I wish more programmers would write tight code. Brevity takes time and talent. But time is money, and the talent wants to be paid.
By the way, Dan, I use IE 7. The status bar reads “Done, but with errors on the page.” Line 1349, char 19, error: object expected. Isn’t that lovely? Firefox shows no errors, tho.
Michael,
Buy a Mac. You have a lot less to worry about with a Mac.
I have no idea what the IE7 error is. I’ve looked at it for a long time and can’t find the problem. Yes, Firefox loads fine. My answer? Switch to Firefox.
Timely article, I spent all day at work trying to work around the bloat in Outlook on one computer and more bloat on video drivers on another computer. Job security and more gray hairs. God Bless and thanks again.
Hope this encourages you and tells you what I think of your blog.
I agree completely. I switched away from Norton a few years ago, first trying Avast, and now I’m on AVG. Although I will say that Office 2k7 is significantly better than the previous versions, both in terms of running quickly and what is offered.
As far as web apps go I’ve moved everything that requires internet access to work to the web. RSS readers, email, etc all fall under that category. So far its worked well.
Hmm, did anyone here have a Timex Sinclair? That was my husband’s first PC. Crimony, I remember mainframes that were nearly the size of a building with multiple punch card terminals. Now cheapo calculators have more memory and versatility than those old relics.
.
I gotta say that with Spysweeper, McAfee, Popup blocker, and only heaven knows what else we’ve installed to keep the bad guys out, our computer has become as slow as molasses and a pain in the posterior. BTW, if any of you are still using dialup, DO NOT try to install any new Earthlink software, no matter how much faster they tell you your computer will run. It will screw up McAfee like no one’s biz and it will keep booting you offline unless/until you disable McAfee. We finally had to do a restore to clear off the new program and reinstall the McAfee. I hate McAfee anyway because it grabs the computer first thing to download updates, no fun if you’re still using pokey dialup. If the new anti-virus system you are using tolerates dialup, Dan, I’ll mention it to my husband as our Mc subscription expires next month.
To make a mistake is human.
To really foul things up requires a computer.
Hoping a light has been sighted at the end of the tunnel, Dan.
As a fellow geek, I’m with you on so much of this.
I did chuckle, though, thinking about how you talk about wanting to buy something off the shelf and not pay ongoing fees to use internet apps, and yet the post seems to have been motivated by your switch in AV app, which requires an annual subscription fee
(I realize that’s unavoidable in this category, but just thought it was kinda amusing.)
I’m off to check out NOD32 since I, too, hate how NAV slows down my system.
Steve,
I was wondering when some smartypants would draw the connection and note the hypocrisy.
Ding, ding, ding—you win!
What really bugs me about NAV is how many background processes it runs. Run a process analyzer and I swear 15% of all running processes are NAV-related. And those processes ain’t small, either.
NOD32 runs two processes and they take up less than 25MB of RAM with no paging. Considering that NOD32 is comprised of a half dozen modules, that’s not too shabby. NAV took up almost a 100MB of RAM when it ran on my system, and it paged like crazy, slowing everything further.
So, given your overall view of software (which I happen to agree with), what word processor do you use? Just curious.
Matt,
On the PC, I use Office 2002.
On the Mac, I use Office 98 for the Mac. And yes, I would love to get a new Mac with OS X. I was holding out for years for the 64-bit Mac processors to come out and the second they did, rumors started circulating that Apple was going to Intel. I knew it would be pointless to buy a new Mac until the Intel-based ones came out. Since the switch, I’ve not had the money to buy a new Mac. For a dedicated Mac lover such as myself, it’s quite painful to admit I do almost all my work on a six-year old Dell.
Matt,
One last thing:
Nicest word processor I ever used was NisusWriter on the Mac. Blew everything else away.
I keep waiting for Apple to come up with an Office killer, but I doubt they ever will. Apple’s lack in this regard is their way of staying friendly with Microsoft. Kill Office for the Mac and you’ve got zero ties between the two companies.
I firmly believe that no one else gets software like Apple does, so everything else pretty much stinks, stuck in old paradigms that worked 20 years ago, but don’t today.
And yeah, I miss OpenDoc, too. That was the future and Apple had too many problems at the time to make it work.
I had a similar experience with NAV a while back. My wife’s PC was suddenly slower than molasses. Pulled up task manager and low and behold, NAV is pulling 60% of the processor with nothing else running. 60%, constantly, just ‘watching’ for something to do.
I switched to AVG free and have loved it.
Other MS bloats:
- I went from Quicken to MS money a few years ago. My 4-5MB Quicken file ended up as 40+MB imported into MS Money. I had to purge out all but a year’s data to get it to work.
- Word Perfect always made nice, small files. Any WP file brought into Word grew bu 50%-100%. But Word is unavoidable anymore.
Salguod,
I don’t think any software is unavoidable anymore. Open source versions of stuff continue to improve. They may never be quite what the paid stuff is, but if they are 95% there, why not go that route?
Since the subject of office software came up, I’ll throw in my two-cents. I switched to the open source OpenOffice.org about a year ago, and have been VERY happy with it. It reads MS office files and saves as MS office files for compatibility with people who still use MS Office.
And it’s free!
OpenOffice was terrible last time I tried it. Bloated beyond comprehension.
For word processing though Abiword has everyhting you need and is sleek and nice.