SlashNOT

christopher baus writes: To satisify Microsoft’s relentless pursuit of desktop performance, Word 2003 will now include a major kernel mode reimplementation.

“After realizing performance gains in our server division by moving our IIS web server core to kernel mode, we realized this advanced server architecture could represent a major benefit our desktop users,” Yousee Bluemore, product manager for Microsoft Office explains. “In fact there is movement a foot to move more applications to kernel mode using our exclusive Direct Speed Architecture.”

“User mode was invented by Microsoft to keep less savy developers from crashing the entire system in the case of an application failure. This often unnecessary protection feature comes at a huge cost to performance. We will still support “user mode” for other developers which might not have Microsoft’s high quality standards.”

In a side note, Bluemore, claims that his team has also fixed the mysterious random image placement bug that has dumbfounded Word users since 1995. According to Bluemore, “Word 2003 has advanced image layout features that actually place images where the user draws the image box.”

Word 2003 is expected to ship in the first quarter of 2004.