When we look at standard desktop usage - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Browser, File Sharing, Messaging - there was a time when developers could make all of this run smoothly on just 128MB of RAM.
That was the typical business setup with Windows NT4 and Office 97 almost 30 years ago.
Today, a Windows 11 laptop with 16GB running the same set of applications is slow as hell whereas it has 100x times more RAM, multi-core CPU, high-throughput SSD.

If one criteria of writing good software is using the least resources for a given task, then Microsoft's developers are doing 100x worse today.

For your publication this year, just ask your LLM to avoid the 2024 excess vocabulary from this study...
and also to avoid the words it was going to use instead...
and then the ones it was going to use after that...

In California, all cars, domestic heaters, and industrial uses are now electric?
Electricity accounts for around 30% of the consumed energy (see https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid...).
Fossil fuels still account for 70% of the energy mix.

The 1984 ad began with a black-and-white world of machines and metal, devoid of creativity, and ended with a living, colorful human smashing a screen with a giant hammer.
This 2024 ad begins with a colorful depiction of human creativity and ends with a giant hammer crushing everything into a black-and-white metal machine.
Over the past 40 years, has Apple lost its way?

How can a company write "Create a sustainable future" (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sustainability) while forcing hundreds of millions of users to throw away their perfectly functional PCs ?

Microsoft will end public support for Windows 10 on May 14, 2024.
Windows 11 only supports PCs that have specific requirements that have only been widely available since mid-2016 (such as TPM 2.0).
Between 2010 and 2016, there were 300 million PCs sold per year, or a total of 2 billion PCs sold, most of them with Windows.
Probably half of these PCs still work perfectly. If they are properly optimized, their power is still more than enough for most home uses: browsing, watching videos, reading emails, playing some simple games...
This means that in one year, due to Microsoft's bad practices in planned obsolescence, 1 billion computers will not be maintained anymore.