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What else might that weather app be doing to justify the memory footprint? MS might suck at memory efficiency, but you can't claim they'd ever miss an opportunity to monetize their users. How can a weather app make MS money? MS has asked themselves this, so maybe we should too.

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You're right that it's a matter of incentives, but it's because of cost not revenue.

It's bloated not because of a sneaky plan to include revenue generation. It's cheaper to make it bloated because quality is costly. They can externalize costs to users and nobody cares.

I play videogames. As soon as it became technically feasible to patch games we began to see videogames come out with first day patches.

When you take away the constraints the slop emerges. You could not make mistakes in software when it was all printed on CDROMs and DVDs.

I remember playing The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall in the 1990s. It came on CD and was very buggy, and I would periodically call Bethesda and they would send me the newest patches on a floppy disk.

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