The 90s was a time when computers were doubling in speed every 18 months. I remember office 97* being lightning fast on. A 366mhz celeron - a cheap chip in 1998.

You could build fast software today by simply adopting a reference platform, say. A 10 year old 4core system. then measuring performance there. If it lags then do whatever work needs to be done to speed it up.

Personally I think we should all adopt the raspberry pi zero as a reference platform.

Edit: * office 2000 was fast too with 32 megs of ram. Seriously what have we done?

Oddly, I remember timing it, and the startup accelerator didn't seem to speed up Office start time. It slowed everything else down though.

I rebooted a lot though (mostly used Linux by then), so maybe it was just fighting with itself when I immediately fired up office after boot.