[damnlimey]

More fodder for all the MS haters out there,but it does raise an interesting question.What do you think are the real reasons for "Bloatware"

[dighton]

"What Grove giveth, Gates taketh away."

[Centurion2000]

bump

[JoeSchem]

The interesting thing about Moore's Law is that it seems to have been suspended by bloatware.

I use the same word processor program I used ten years ago. The new machine is ten times faster and has ten times the memory and storage capacity of the old machine.

However, the new machine is not ten times faster, or ten times better. While I can certainly pick up 'obsolete' machines for the cheap, no one is making new machines that can do what my old one did for one-tenth the cost. Indeed, to do exactly what I do now with my current machine, I'd have to spend just as much -- though two or three Moore generations have passed since I bought my last machine.

Is this 'running twice as fast to stay in the same place' what Moore had in mind?

[fnord]

not necessarily anti-MS. ALL code becomes bloated in time - creeping featuritis, bells and whistles, cross-platform and hardware issues. I'm bumping to check out the Assembly language links for later :-)

[Fiddlstix]

Bump

[lelio]

But the same "Hello, World" program written in Visual C++ takes fully 10,369 bytes--that's 25 times as much code!
So 25x of the code bloat is something that I can't even control?

[CubicleGuy]

I still use (extensively) a DOS program called T/Master which does database, spreadsheets, word processing, telecommunications (async telecom stuff that has become largely irrelevant in the face of the Internet), graphing and the like. In fact, I believe that I owe a lot of the success I've had as a mainframe programmer/analyst to the ability of this tool to enable me to do stuff (analysis of test results, summarization of data, etc.) on my PC that I'd have to write mainframe programs to do if I didn't have it. It's not sold or maintained any more, and it's got some minor Y2K flaws, but it's still darn helpful. I only use Microsoft Word and Excel when I absolutely have to.

[RogueIsland]

What do you think are the real reasons for "Bloatware"

Shhh. It's good for my Intel stock.

[Smogger]

Blah blah blah.. I don't know what you cats are programming (or if you are programming at all) but todays software enviroment requires what we like to call Rapid Application Development (RAD). Which means we cannot sit around in a room tinkering in Assembly all day long working on one function. You want to know the reason why software is bloated? Because development in high level languages is 1000 times faster than development in lower level languages.

If you develop a fanstastic piece of software in 2 years using assembly and I develop a competing piece of software in overbloated VB, but I release my working program in 2 months guess who captures the market?

I don't know about the rest of you but the software I am developing requires RAD. It is much cheaper to throw some hardware at the problem after the fact then to pay dozens more programmers to sit around and write the app in aseembly (or in my case even C++).

[bwteim]

What do you think are the real reasons for "Bloatware"

It's not the surplus of disk space or increased hardware performance. It has everything to do with Programming Design or the lack of it. This lack is a result of:

• Poor programming instruction (or insufficient self-teaching) leading to...
• bad coding practices;
• coupled by inadequate supervision/management of those responsible for 'systems' of their own programming staff and accompanied by...
• inadequate programming standards (such as permitting no documentation, no modular thinking, no shared libraries/resources)...
• rush deadlines agreed to by managers causing their programming staff to have to take short cuts and either produce inadequate documentation or eliminate documentation;
• The operating environment as in the 'shop itself'. For example, high programmer turnover and its impact on somebody having to go behind and decode spaghetti.
• How about managers hired to supervise programmers who themselves have never written a line?

And in the end, a shop that does not have standards and agrees to insane deadlines for their coders ends up with..... Bloatware - or worse, Crap Bloatware.

fnord notes that bloatware also is caused by featuritis or feature creep. This is often so in cases where there are no standards. A shop with proper programming standards and realistic timelines would allow permit such features within a decipherable program.

Bush2000 noted: "This article is tripe."

Good data processing managers/systems analysts would disagree with you.

FYI, Bush2000, MS/Windows does not have the franchise on Bloatware....

[ArGee]

More fodder for all the MS haters out there,but it does raise an interesting question.What do you think are the real reasons for "Bloatware"

Precisely 2:

1. People will buy it and
2. Hardware is cheaper than programmer time.

Shalom.

[tarpon_bill]

One of the big problems is that MS has decided that a lot of unnecessary junk is run in the background so if you ever need it you have it running. and running. and running. and

A big cure for bloatware would be to make this crap go away in the base install and allow the user to pick and choose what you want to run. I cut down all the unnecessary crap by removing it from the start-up files. It is still there if I need the function but I don't get it by default.

To see this it action just install IE and see what level of 'neat' useless sites are stuck all through your bookmarks and tool bar windows.

this is where your cpu cycles go. Agreed storage and memory are almost free, but cpu cycles are a still limited commodity.

snooker

[discostu]

Graphics. Everything has to be shiny with buttons and animations and all kind of other crap. The underlieing architecture has something to do with it too, you just can't make a truly small application for windows. Developer laziness is high on the list too, nobody really tries to make tight code (of course a lot is done in VB which is phyisically incapable of supporting tight code). But in the end it's the shiny buttons and pretty graphics, they bloat executable size (the buttons in your word processor probably take more harddrive space than the whole WP did back in the 80s) and slow everything down.

But usability has been improved. At least that's what they tell me to say.

[_Jim]

What do you think are the real reasons for "Bloatware"

HA!

Have you seen the requirements for installing Linux?

Linux ISN'T immune to this 'phenomenon' either ...

[usconservative]

What do you think are the real reasons for "Bloatware"

Simple question, simple answer: The reason for all the bloatware, is because Programmers will link & compile entire libraries of code into their application, even if they're only using one or two functions from that library.

Much of this article struck a chord with me. My first programming job out of college was with a financial services company, that specialized in car dealership management software. The first version of the entire application ran on a single 1.2mb floppy - and that included months worth of sales and service records. Granted, this was back in 1987.

In 1990 when I left, the code was up to 3mb to run, with a months sales taking up another 3mb. As we added functionality, our function libraries got bigger and bigger. When we switched programming tools, our code base tripled, simply from the nature of the compiler, and the necessary re-write of the code to utilize NEW function libraries.

This article makes perfect sense, the author is spot on. The tools to create the applications are hogs. The libraries required to write code and add functionality are hogs. Programmers (self included) are hogs because we're lazy. We'll gladly link in that entire function library to get the ONE function we need. As long as we don't have to write it from scratch, it's fine by us.

[r9etb]

What do you think are the real reasons for "Bloatware"

Process, schedule, and cost.

Once you get something running, and an OS built around it, the financial and time arguments against brand-new development, and in favor of "adding on and working around," is well-nigh insurmountable.

[supercat]

My preferred text editor is PC-Write version 3, circa 1988. I still use it, and it runs nicely on modern machines. 'Course it ran pretty well on my 4.77Mhz 8088 also.

What is the difference between hardware and software?

As time goes by, hardware gets smaller, faster, and cheaper; software gets bigger, slower, and more expensive.

[supercat]

One of the things I like about my job is that there's value in getting a piece of PICmicro or 8x51 code into a small code space. My greatest accomplishment in that regard was squeezing a brush pressure control module, including a terminal-based setup function, into a 1Kword part [that was a tight fit, but the 16F84 was at the time the only in-circuit reprogrammable PIC available]. Too bad there's not much need for such skills in the PC world...

[bvw]

Buyers crave Bloatware. They crave it because it is Bloat-ed.

Programming, engineering and cost considerations are moot. There is something about Bloatware, things about Bloatware, that make people want to but it.

[PatrioticAmerican]

Excellent article.