thirty-nineSTRATEGY LETTER IV:BLOATWARE AND THE80/20 MYTH
FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2001
Version 5.0 of Microsoft's flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge; it required a whole 15MB of hard drive space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB PC hard drives (around 1985), so 15MB sure seemed like a lot.
By the time Excel 2000 came out, it required a whopping 146MB—almost a tenfold increase! Dang those sloppy Microsoft programmers, right?
Wrong.
I'll bet you think I'm going to write one of those boring articles you see all over the net bemoaning "bloatware." Whine whine whine, this stuff is so bloated, oh woe is me, edlin and vi are so much better than Word and Emacs because they are svelte, etc.
Ha ha! ...
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