"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" - it's more likely that Microsoft's PMs and developers felt swayed by new features and possibilities and when the issue of performance came up, it was "meh, the average computer selling today can cope with it" and therefore little thought was given to performance on older tech or tech that has most of its performance diverted to other tasks.

I am thinking that this comment came about in the era of the OS/2 Microsoft-IBM project. It was clear that IBM had a culture of kloc being a positive metric, and Microsoft did not.

I think it is useful to keep in mind that gobs of features sell, and (was it Joel Spolskey?) someone noted that any given user needs only 11% of a product such as a word processor, but another user needs a different 13%.

Apart from computers getting faster, Microsoft, Adobe and others should also keep up the artificial trade adequacy. If 20 years ago you'd gladly pay $400 for a software package that arrives on 20 floppy disks, the same amount today should be payed for a couple of DVD's to get the same level of emotional satisfaction. $400 for a 30-second download would be perceived as highly inadequate today, unfortunately.