"The scholar seeketh daily increase of knowing; the sage of Tao daily decrease of doing. He decreaseth it, again and again, until he doth no act with the lust of result. Having attained this Inertia all accomplisheth itself. He who attracteth to himself all that is under Heaven doth so without effort. He who maketh effort is not able to attract it." - Tao Teh King, Chapter XLVIII (Crowley's translation)
Too bad that it doesn't seem like Microsoft applied that philosophy to most of its products (at least not back when I used their products. Maybe they've started recently -- I've stopped following them a few years ago when I bought a Mac).
I wonder if any ex-Microsoft employee ever came out and said that they actually had the explicit goal of making each successive version of their main products (windows, office) much slower than the last so that people would upgrade to a new computer, making Intel happy, and leading to more "comes with the computer" licenses instead of pirating.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" - it's more likely that Microsoft's PMs and developers felt swayed by new features and possibilities and when the issue of performance came up, it was "meh, the average computer selling today can cope with it" and therefore little thought was given to performance on older tech or tech that has most of its performance diverted to other tasks.
Indeed, it could be that. But I'm still wondering if maybe it was more deliberate than that. After all, it would have been a way to make more money for both Microsoft and Intel, so there was an incentive there. And the downside was very small (what was the average Windows user going to switch to between 1995 and 2005?)
I am thinking that this comment came about in the era of the OS/2 Microsoft-IBM project. It was clear that IBM had a culture of kloc being a positive metric, and Microsoft did not.
I think it is useful to keep in mind that gobs of features sell, and (was it Joel Spolskey?) someone noted that any given user needs only 11% of a product such as a word processor, but another user needs a different 13%.
Apart from computers getting faster, Microsoft, Adobe and others should also keep up the artificial trade adequacy. If 20 years ago you'd gladly pay $400 for a software package that arrives on 20 floppy disks, the same amount today should be payed for a couple of DVD's to get the same level of emotional satisfaction. $400 for a 30-second download would be perceived as highly inadequate today, unfortunately.
