Great article, although it is not merely a Microsoft problem. Take virtually any OS, and it will be a monolith that can potentially be taken down with a few kilobytes of malicious code. Software comes out to maximaze the use of the hardware. For example, MacOS X does not run very well on my G3 Pismo laptop, while MacOS 9 worked wonderfully. The same is true for Linux distros, if you compare Red Hat 9 to Red Hat 7 (with GNOME), there is a significant performance difference there (if they're ran on the same machine).

What needs to be done is developers need to once in a while go through everything and take that bloatiness out, maybe optimize some things using newer technologies... but unfortinately life often does not work that way.

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