---
created_at: '2013-11-02T23:34:44.000Z'
title: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)
url: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
author: shawndumas
points: 41
story_text: ''
comment_text: 
num_comments: 58
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1383435284
_tags:
- story
- author_shawndumas
- story_6661343
objectID: '6661343'

---
Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out
in 1993. It was positively *huge*: it required a whole *15 megabytes* of
hard drive space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB
PC hard drives (around 1985) and so 15MB sure seemed like a lot.

By the time Excel 2000 came out, it required a whopping 146MB … almost a
tenfold increase\! Dang those sloppy Microsoft programmers,
right?

![](https://i1.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2001/03/Main_Beach_Lifeguards.jpg?resize=356%2C219&ssl=1)

Wrong.

I’ll bet you think I’m going to write one of those boring articles you
see all over the net  bemoaning “bloatware”.  Whine whine whine, this
stuff is so bloated, oh woe is me, edlin and vi are *so* much better
than Word and Emacs because they are svelte, etc.

Ha ha\! I tricked you\! I’m not going to write that article again,
because it’s not true.

In 1993, given the cost of hard drives in those days, Microsoft Excel
5.0 took up about $36 worth of hard drive space.

In 2000, given the cost of hard drives in 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000
takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space.

(These figures are adjusted for inflation and based on hard drive price
data from [here](http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625/winchest.html).)

In real terms, it’s almost like Excel is actually *getting smaller*\!

What is bloatware, exactly? [The Jargon
File](http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/bloatware.html)
snidely defines it as “software that provides minimal functionality
while requiring a disproportionate amount of diskspace and memory.
Especially used for application and OS upgrades. This term is very
common in the Windows/NT world. So is its cause.”

I guess those guys just hate Windows. I haven’t run out of memory in
more than a decade, ever since virtual memory appeared in Windows 386
(1989). And hard drive space is down to $0.0071 per megabyte and still
plummeting like a sheep learning to fly by jumping out of a tree.

Maybe Linus Åkerlund can explain it. On his web page, he
[writes](http://user.tninet.se/~uxm165t/bloatware.html), “The big
disadvantage of using these bloated programs is that you have to load
this very large program, even if you just want to accomplish one tiny
little thing. It eats up all your memory… you’re not using your system
in an efficient way. You make the system seem more inefficient than it
really is, and this is totally unnecessary.”

Ohhh. It eats up all your memory. I see. Actually, well, no, it doesn’t.
Ever since Windows 1.0, in 1987, the operating system only loads pages
as they are used. If you have a 15MB executable and you only use code
that spans 2MB worth of pages, you will only ever load 2MB from disk to
RAM. In fact if you have a modern version of Windows, the OS will
automatically rearrange those pages on the hard drive so that they’re
consecutive, which makes the program start even faster next time.

And I don’t think anyone will deny that on today’s overpowered,
under-priced computers, loading a huge program is still faster than
loading a small program was even 5 years ago. So what’s the problem?

[RA Downes](http://www.blu.org/faq/bloat.html) gives us a clue. It looks
like he spent *hours* dissecting a small Microsoft utility, apparently
enraged that it was a whole megabyte in size. (That’s 3.15 cents of hard
drive space at the time he wrote the article). In his opinion, the
program should have been around 95% smaller. The joke is that the
utility he dissected is something called RegClean, which you’ve probably
never heard of. This is a program that goes through your Windows
registry looking for things that aren’t being used and deleting them.
You have to be a little bit on the obsessive-compulsive side to care
about cleaning up unused parts of your registry. So I’m starting to
suspect that fretting about bloatware is more of a [mental health
problem](http://www.mentalhealth.com/dis/p20-an05.html) than a software
problem.

In fact there are lots of great reasons for bloatware. For one, if
programmers don’t have to worry about how large their code is, they can
ship it sooner. And that means you get more features, and features make
your life better (when you use them) and don’t usually hurt (when you
don’t). If your software vendor stops, before shipping, and spends two
months squeezing the code down to make it 50% smaller, the net benefit
to you is going to be imperceptible. Maybe, just maybe, if you tend to
keep your hard drive full, that’s one more Duran Duran MP3 you can
download. But the loss to you of waiting an extra two months for the new
version *is* perceptible, and the loss to the software company that has
to give up two months of sales is even worse.

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It
*seems* to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the
features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20%
of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. 

Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a *different* set
of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of *dozens* of
companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release
“lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This
story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they
give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews
it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the
journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need
because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s
not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the
journalist ends up writing [a
story](http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2681437,00.html)
that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat
is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words.
If I had a dollar for
[every](http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/tech/reviews/finder/rev_1030.htm)
time this has happened I would be very happy.

When you start marketing your “lite” product, and you tell people, “hey,
it’s lite, only 1MB,” they tend to be very happy, then they ask you if
it has *their* crucial feature, and it doesn’t, so they don’t buy your
product.

Bottom line: if your strategy is “80/20”, you’re going to have trouble
selling software. That’s just reality. This strategy is as old as the
software industry itself and it just doesn’t pay; what’s surprising is
how many executives at [fast companies](http://www.fuckedcompany.com/)
think that it’s going to work.

Jamie Zawinski says it best,
[discussing](http://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html) the original
version of Netscape that changed the world. “Convenient though it would
be if it were true, Mozilla \[Netscape 1.0\] is not big because it’s
full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your
needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean
web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But
being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote
Mozilla.”
