I'd have to agree with this. Low-level "close to the metal" programming is something I have very little experience with, but based on my understanding, this research has extremely limited scope. The technique relied on what is essentially prior knowledge of the implementation. This doesn't mean it isn't very useful for companies like Adobe...it is. However, it does not look like anyone intended for this to be broadly applicable.

The optimizations themselves are pretty domain-specific, but the techniques used to instrument and modify the target program are - as you yourself point out in another comment - pretty widely applicable. That's where the real innovation lies.

The confusion arises from the apostrophe that implied that IrfanView somehow belongs to Microsoft Windows (it doesn't). I almost made the same mistake while reading quickly.