> I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the repeated quote about how Amazon loses $X million for every Y milliseconds of page loading time, as an example.

This is true for sites that are trying to make sales. You can quantify how much a delay affects closing a sale.

For other apps, it’s less clear. During its high-growth years, MS Office had an abysmally long startup time.

Maybe this was due to MS having a locked-in base of enterprise users. But given that OpenOffice and LibreOffice effectively duplicated long startup times, I don’t think it’s just that.

You also see the Adobe suite (and also tools like GIMP) with some excruciatingly long startup times.

I think it’s very likely that startup times of office apps have very little impact on whether users will buy the software.