Speaking of Windows and performance, how about that RAM crisis? Microsoft is feeling the squeeze too, and is apparently doing work up and down the Windows stack to improve its memory consumption.
Microsoft’s Windows chief Pavan Davuluri has admitted that the rising cost of memory is pushing the company to make Windows 11 use less RAM. Microsoft is working on the Windows memory manager, memory compression, WinUI 3 and WebView2, and has made “memory optimization for 8GB and above” an official priority for the rest of 2026.
↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest
This might be the only positive consequence of the RAM crisis.
There should be plenty of low hanging fruit for companies that actually want to bother with software optimization because our industry has gotten so cavalier about gross amounts of RAM usage. Even developers like myself who care about the bloat problem have been strongly disincentivized by companies from doing anything about it. They don’t want to pay to make software robust, much less worry about optimization. Instead we’ve normalized the “systematic debugging and optimization are optional; ship it as is”. So as each hardware generation brought us more resources: RAM/CPU/etc, publishers would deliver software that largely negated the better specs….so frustrating!
I wish it didn’t take a RAM crisis, but it seems plausible that RAMageddon could create some commercial pressure to prioritize bloat problems at least a little bit. Whether it’s operating systems, games, applications, the next generation of software might need less RAM than would have been required had RAMageddon not happened. Of course I still hesitate to call it a win because the situation has been so harmful to consumers overall.