156 lines
7.5 KiB
Markdown
156 lines
7.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2013-11-02T23:34:44.000Z'
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title: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)
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url: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
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author: shawndumas
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points: 41
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 58
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1383435284
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_shawndumas
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- story_6661343
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objectID: '6661343'
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year: 2001
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---
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Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out
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in 1993. It was positively *huge*: it required a whole *15 megabytes* of
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hard drive space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB
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PC hard drives (around 1985) and so 15MB sure seemed like a lot.
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By the time Excel 2000 came out, it required a whopping 146MB … almost a
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tenfold increase\! Dang those sloppy Microsoft programmers,
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right?
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Wrong.
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I’ll bet you think I’m going to write one of those boring articles you
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see all over the net bemoaning “bloatware”. Whine whine whine, this
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stuff is so bloated, oh woe is me, edlin and vi are *so* much better
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than Word and Emacs because they are svelte, etc.
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Ha ha\! I tricked you\! I’m not going to write that article again,
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because it’s not true.
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In 1993, given the cost of hard drives in those days, Microsoft Excel
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5.0 took up about $36 worth of hard drive space.
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In 2000, given the cost of hard drives in 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000
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takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space.
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(These figures are adjusted for inflation and based on hard drive price
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data from [here](http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625/winchest.html).)
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In real terms, it’s almost like Excel is actually *getting smaller*\!
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What is bloatware, exactly? [The Jargon
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File](http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/bloatware.html)
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snidely defines it as “software that provides minimal functionality
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while requiring a disproportionate amount of diskspace and memory.
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Especially used for application and OS upgrades. This term is very
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common in the Windows/NT world. So is its cause.”
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I guess those guys just hate Windows. I haven’t run out of memory in
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more than a decade, ever since virtual memory appeared in Windows 386
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(1989). And hard drive space is down to $0.0071 per megabyte and still
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plummeting like a sheep learning to fly by jumping out of a tree.
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Maybe Linus Åkerlund can explain it. On his web page, he
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[writes](http://user.tninet.se/~uxm165t/bloatware.html), “The big
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disadvantage of using these bloated programs is that you have to load
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this very large program, even if you just want to accomplish one tiny
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little thing. It eats up all your memory… you’re not using your system
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in an efficient way. You make the system seem more inefficient than it
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really is, and this is totally unnecessary.”
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Ohhh. It eats up all your memory. I see. Actually, well, no, it doesn’t.
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Ever since Windows 1.0, in 1987, the operating system only loads pages
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as they are used. If you have a 15MB executable and you only use code
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that spans 2MB worth of pages, you will only ever load 2MB from disk to
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RAM. In fact if you have a modern version of Windows, the OS will
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automatically rearrange those pages on the hard drive so that they’re
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consecutive, which makes the program start even faster next time.
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And I don’t think anyone will deny that on today’s overpowered,
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under-priced computers, loading a huge program is still faster than
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loading a small program was even 5 years ago. So what’s the problem?
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[RA Downes](http://www.blu.org/faq/bloat.html) gives us a clue. It looks
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like he spent *hours* dissecting a small Microsoft utility, apparently
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enraged that it was a whole megabyte in size. (That’s 3.15 cents of hard
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drive space at the time he wrote the article). In his opinion, the
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program should have been around 95% smaller. The joke is that the
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utility he dissected is something called RegClean, which you’ve probably
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never heard of. This is a program that goes through your Windows
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registry looking for things that aren’t being used and deleting them.
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You have to be a little bit on the obsessive-compulsive side to care
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about cleaning up unused parts of your registry. So I’m starting to
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suspect that fretting about bloatware is more of a [mental health
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problem](http://www.mentalhealth.com/dis/p20-an05.html) than a software
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problem.
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In fact there are lots of great reasons for bloatware. For one, if
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programmers don’t have to worry about how large their code is, they can
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ship it sooner. And that means you get more features, and features make
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your life better (when you use them) and don’t usually hurt (when you
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don’t). If your software vendor stops, before shipping, and spends two
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months squeezing the code down to make it 50% smaller, the net benefit
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to you is going to be imperceptible. Maybe, just maybe, if you tend to
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keep your hard drive full, that’s one more Duran Duran MP3 you can
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download. But the loss to you of waiting an extra two months for the new
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version *is* perceptible, and the loss to the software company that has
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to give up two months of sales is even worse.
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A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It
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*seems* to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the
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features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20%
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of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
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Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a *different* set
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of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of *dozens* of
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companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release
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“lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This
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story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they
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give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews
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it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the
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journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need
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because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s
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not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the
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journalist ends up writing [a
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story](http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2681437,00.html)
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that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat
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is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words.
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If I had a dollar for
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[every](http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/tech/reviews/finder/rev_1030.htm)
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time this has happened I would be very happy.
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When you start marketing your “lite” product, and you tell people, “hey,
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it’s lite, only 1MB,” they tend to be very happy, then they ask you if
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it has *their* crucial feature, and it doesn’t, so they don’t buy your
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product.
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Bottom line: if your strategy is “80/20”, you’re going to have trouble
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selling software. That’s just reality. This strategy is as old as the
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software industry itself and it just doesn’t pay; what’s surprising is
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how many executives at [fast companies](http://www.fuckedcompany.com/)
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think that it’s going to work.
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Jamie Zawinski says it best,
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[discussing](http://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html) the original
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version of Netscape that changed the world. “Convenient though it would
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be if it were true, Mozilla \[Netscape 1.0\] is not big because it’s
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full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your
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needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean
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web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But
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being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote
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Mozilla.”
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