Let's Talk More About Bloated Software

In the last post, I briefly mentioned how much bloated general software have become over the years. Let’s talk about it in details to see the whole situation.

To be clear, I’m not criticizing the big tech companies for any of their work: as businesses they need to generate profits, and their work benefits other people, too. No matter what their reasons are, what they do creates a world where the efforts we need to use technology is minimized, and that’s a good thing. They are also leading the world’s technology with providing newer solutions for our problems, and they wouldn’t be able to do so without generating profits from these new technology. What I’m trying to do here is to provide some view of the situation.

I still remember my first PC: it was an old, big one which, before that, had belonged to my cousin. It had the first version of Intel Celeron, which is an “equivalent”, cheaper and weaker version of Pentium III, 128 Mb of Ram, 20 GB of HDD and ran Windows 98 quite smoothly. The machine alone (i.e. without its clunky giant CRT monitor and its mouse, keyboard, speakers, etc.) weighted about four times the Macbook I’m having, and if you talk about the computation power: comparing Celeron CPU to Core i5, 128MB to 8GB of Ram, 20 GB HDD to 256 GB of SSD, etc., I’d say we need more than twenty of that old PC running in parallel to be able to compare with the laptop.

It sounds crazy, but even though twenty years ago I couldn’t dream to have something haft as powerful as my Macbook, for me right now the Macbook is still too weak and slow: It gets sluggy from time to time, even with “relatively lightweight” app like VSCode. I wouldn’t dare to install XCode in it either, it would take forever to open and I wouldn’t be able to do anything much anyway.

This isn’t a post comparing the operating systems, but I realized that I mentioned Windows 98 and Macbook, so just for the sake of fairness, Windows 10 isn’t in anyway better than MacOSX when we talk about how clunky the system is. Granted that I haven’t used Windows 10 in the last one year and a half, I used it for about 2 years before that, so I can make the comparison.

My Macbook is Pro, 13-inch of version 2017, so it’s not the newest and most powerful Macbook you can buy. But it isn’t old either, and if you go out and buy it now, it still costs 1500-2000 USD, depending on where you live.

So what happened? How come the computer gets so much faster, but somehow still is slow?

The answer: Because as the hardware improves, the software also gets heavier. Of course, there are reasons for that, both good and … eh, not so good ones:

1. Newer and better hardware requires more sophisticated drivers to control them. Those drivers, in turn, take up more space in disk and memory and requires more computation than drivers for older hardware. You can see this clearly when you compare your 4k screen with, say, a CRT screen of 20 years ago.

2. We surely want to have more things on our computer nowadays. For example, in my old PC back then I had only Microsoft Office, a couple of games and some hundreds megabytes of music in wma format, which is super lightweight (but doesn’t sound very good).

3. Software gets more bloated.

The first two points surely contribute to the expansion of software, but they alone cannot make a top-brand laptop produced three years ago become obsolete just yet. The real problem here is the software gets more and more bloated.

In my previous post about minimalist software, I briefly mentioned that the main reason for the massive expansion in software is the fact that software users have various demands, and software producers normally try to satisfy all users by releasing more bloated software. That’s one of the reasons why the software needs to be bloated. In my point of view, there’s at least three more reasons:

1. As the hardware gets so good now, it’s hard to make the customers buy new computers without making them realize that their current ones are not enough. The best way to do that is via software: as people continue getting updated with newer software version with more features, at some point they will find out that their old hardware is too old, and they need new.

2. Big software producers want to keep users in their ecosystems by offering more and more functionalities that minimizes the needs to look for the solutions somewhere else. This creates more loyal customers, which is definitely good for the business.

Of course, we, as users, also can benefit from this continuous development of software: A big ecosystem normally consists of several things that make your workflow more convenient. For example, you can close your laptop and then immediately continue whatever you were working on from your phone, etc. It was the kind of things that unimaginable just a few years back. We also do not have to think too much or read through bunches of documents before feeling ready to use our computers, or any kind of device. Everything is ready and just seamlessly works.

But at the same time, dipping yourself too deep into an ecosystem may raise an issue of dependency. At some point, you won’t have a choice in anything: if an application in your workflow broke, or there’s an update that you don’t like, you won’t be able to fix it or replace it with another. Worst of all, what if for some weird reason, you got banned from the ecosystem, what would you do? Would your life end there?

Putting the independence topic aside, chasing technology still is not be a game everyone likes to play (it costs a lot of money), and even fewer people really need to play that game. What if you don’t care about new and fancy stuff? What if you just want to keep using your old, favorite computer that you bought some years ago the way you keep wearing your old jacket or wearing your old shoes? What if you care about the technology waste and just don’t want to throw away your old, but not broken, computers? Staying in one ecosystem, you can still do that, as long as you turn off your Internet, so that the operating system doesn’t notice and pop up those annoying banner asking you when will you stop working so that it can install that new update (Mind you though, sometimes it won’t even ask at all).

Do we have a choice? We do. More on that on a later post.