Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 27th Dec 2012 19:50 UTC

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Member since:
2011-05-19
But you don't need to get more powerful hardware. A $200 netbook will run Office 2013 just fine.
In the 1990s, we actually did need to buy new systems just to run the latest software. Now, we don't. To insist that developers spend their time making their code as small as possible is a waste, when they could instead spend that time on performance optimization, or battery efficiency, or -- heaven forbid -- a new feature that greatly improves the software's capabilities.
Do I care that Chrome is ten times bigger than Netscape Communicator 4.0, which was considered to be very bloated? No! I can do much more in Chrome. The extra 200 MB is well worth it to me.
What's in Office 2013 that takes up so much space? I'm not going to list every feature, but the largest single feature appears to be PowerPivot (183 MB). It's essentially a full OLAP database engine, bundled with Excel. Is it bloat? It is if you don't use it! After all, Excel is a spreadsheet, not a database.
But the thing is, Excel is often used as a database. Or, it's used to analyze data that came out of a database. To someone trying to analyze hundreds of thousands of rows of data in Excel, the feature is invaluable.
"Bloat" just means "all the features that I don't use." As I said previously, one man's bloat is another man's feature. One don't have to be able to list every single feature and account for every single MB to realize that.