Today, Adam Albright made these interesting comments ...

[snip]
I keep wondering why so may miss the point that Windows is
bloated. It has nothing to do with how much free disk space
you have or how much hard drives cost or how fast a system you
run it on. Because Windows is bloated at some say 500 million
lines of code (doubt it that's big) it is without a doubt
infested top to bottom with coding errors. Murphy's Law
applies. The larger the size of any "program" or it Windows
case zillions of little applets all tied together with most
not having a clue what the other applets do, you multiply the
potential for human error by a huge factor.

Adam, I am hardly "missing" the fact that Vista, like all modern
software, is bloated and inefficiently written and/or compiled as
the driving force is increased sales with minimum human cost, not
the ultra-high HW cost that once drove the industry. But, I am
trying this time around not to develop the rep again of calling
Vista "Windoze" and Microsoft "M$", so I'm just ignoring the
obvious in public.

This "problem" multiplies with each new release of Windows
because each newer version is bigger and Microsoft never seems
to find time to get around to fixing all the bugs in the
previous release so in effect they get carried over and the
latest version adds new, mostly yet undiscovered bugs. What a
way to run a railroad.

Again, it isn't just MS. Product cycles for major, and even some
minor apps and utilities used to be 2-3 years, then it was 2
years, then it was 18 months, now it is 12 months and dropping.
That is clearly NOT what MS is doing, not even if you call an SP
a product cycle release. But, it IS what everybody else is doing
in their frenzy to artificially increase sales to their installed
base by either frightening them into upgrading so they don't fall
behind, or moving the GUI around so that it looks new.

I cannot - and will not - buy new versions or all-new
apps/utilities every year! And, ALL of my software either runs
poorly on Vista, as it is on the old side and thus no longer
supported or I would have to upgrade to fully take advantage of
today's HW and Vista in general.

There is nothing wrong with adding new features. Still it
would be hard to say Vista isn't bloated with all kinds of
clutter. This is also true for browsers.

Most people, maybe all of us, have trouble differentiating
between needs and wants. And, the job of marketing for ANY
industry whether hard or soft, whether product or service, and no
matter what market segment, is to plant the seeds of discontent
in a current or potential new customer that they will die a
painful death if they don't buy X, Y, or Z.

I am in the American car biz, as you would guess, and not only
have the Big Three discovered that this upgrade-at-any-cost
syndrome, i.e., buy a new car, no longer works, even the Asians
(other than the Chinese) and Europeans are "discoverying" it. In
my biz, people simply cannot afford to "upgrade" especially as
they are being "downsized" for salary, so they repair and drive
for 5, 8, 12 years and upwards of 150-200,000 miles.

Moore's Law has kept costs dropping while performance increases
so the shrinking car market thingy hasn't seemed to hurt
computers, but eventually it will. The market is virtually
saturated and people do have other things to do with their time
and money.

I don't know if it works with Vista, probably not, but if
you're still running XP, download a copy of the Opera browser.
Use it for just a day or two and then go back to IE7.

You'll see the difference immediately between lean mean fast
running code and bloatware.

Well, I refuse to let MS install IE7 and will continue to do so
while a breath is left in my XP body. Fast code CAN be written,
but MS has NEVER - in my view and many others - been a true
innovator no matter what Bill Gates says, and has never been a
purveyor of fast, efficient software, at least not since the
halcyon days of MS DOS. I remember fondly how slow MS software
development tools were to run and how lightning fast Turbo Pascal
was to compile and also execute that it was mind boggling. But,
so long as new mass-market PC hardware drives new customers to
Vista - and thus to upgraded apps - and millions of other people
go on some sort of feeding frenzy to buy new SW, it will succeed.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might agree that the HW and SW
bunch are in cahoots on this, but I'm not.

--
HP, aka Jerry