Regarding costs, I recall being aghast at the size of the storage required simply for the “clippy” variants for Microsoft Word. I hated that feature anyway.

Plus let us all recall that Bill Gates and Microsoft didn’t become mind-bogglingly rich by giving away their “features”, just like Vegas isn’t paid for by the winnings of visitors. The IT industry as a whole pays megabucks (actually, gigabucks) to Microsoft, and this cost is ultimately borne by the consumer. So you still pay for all those features you don’t like in very real dollars. Usually it is not obvious however since when most consumers buy a computer they don’t see the cost of the OS; it is folded into the base price. And more indirect costs are even harder to see.

A long time ago I paraphrased Ken Kennedy by saying that I didn’t know how powerful the hardware will be in 2020, but it will still take a few minutes to boot Windows. I think I could add that however large the default storage device on a stock computer will be in 2020, a significant portion of it will be dedicated to Windows.

Not that I am knocking Microsoft per se — I am just pointing out that there are lost of costs to which we have become accustomed. And many of the features they pay for are nice IMO. And best of all I don’t have to see the clippy cruft, whether or not it is still there.

Back to the OS size hypothesis. I think part of the problem is the continual grind regarding upgrades. There’s this feeling that the next new thing has to be bigger, better, faster and stronger than the one before. Bloat supposedly becomes irrelevant because drives become bigger, processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper. So the marketing requirement of smaller, tighter and more elegant solution fall off the table (if such requirements ever existed.)

Unfortunately, the guys that do the testing don’t get a bigger budget and the definition of a show stopping bug is rounded off at the corners, because it can always be fixed with Windows Update.