> Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?

Probably because it is horrible? It's indicative of how we spend less time optimizing code than we do coming up with computationally expensive, inefficient workarounds.

Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office (I made that number up). Why should Office be partially loaded the other 98% of the time? How is it acceptable to use those resources?

When are we actually going to start using the new compute capabilities in our machines, rather than letting them get consumed by unoptimized, barely decent code?