Comment on Why is Windows still bloated

• faltryka@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The point is that they have no financial incentive to clean up or prevent bloat, so they don’t.

  Linux doesn’t either, but the Linux community operates on principles and passion instead of financial incentives, and so thusly is not similarly bloated.

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  • Quicky@piefed.social ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Ah right, yeah the bloat I’m asking about isn’t so much about all the shit applications they bundle in, but the stuff that remains to maintain compatibility with obscure or legacy hardware/applications.

    The financial incentive would be long term user retention, combined with a simplified codebase and performance improvements.

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    • Piwix@lemmy.today ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The legacy compatibility is very important for microsoft’s enterprise customers, many of whom are still using some legacy software for aging machinery. A lot of big businesses are slow to move away from legacy software because it always incurs cost. Often they will tell microsoft and other companies they buy products from that compatibility is essential. They won’t invest thousands or millions of dollars to upgrade their aging infrastructure simply on microsoft’s insistence with their new product.

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      • Quicky@piefed.social ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Wouldn’t the aging hardware running that legacy software not be upgradable to the latest Windows versions due to modern hardware requirements anyway?

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    • siph@feddit.org ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      What financial incentive is there in user retention and code improvements? Windows licences likely don’t contribute a large share of MSFTs income (would have to look it up, but am currently sitting in a train with just a smartphone) and even with all the shit since Win11, Windows is still the largest OS by far.

      MSFT is earning a lot of money with AI & cloud. Any increase in revenue there likely dwarf possible gains in Windows improvements.

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      • Quicky@piefed.social ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        What financial incentive is there in user retention and code improvements?

        Is that a serious question?

        Simplified codebase = fewer internal resources required.

        User retention = continued revenue streams from applications and services that run on that platform.

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    • towerful@programming.dev ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      That’s not a big financial incentive.
      Microsoft will remove stuff when it actually gets in the way.
      If it’s easier to leave in and not have to touch dozens of other programs/services then they will.
      They might mark it as depreciating, and start planning a suitable replacement. They might just mark it as depreciating and kick the can down the road.
      When enough services that relied on that depreciating thing have been touched due to other updates, then they might look at actioning the depreciation.

      But if it doesn’t actively break the thing they are currently working on, the cost overhead or ripping it out is insane.
      There might be other dev teams working on features that now rely/leverage the thing marked as depreciating. But the thing getting marked as depreciating happened towards the end of the other teams new feature development cycle. At which point actually depreciating the thing might invalidate that other teams entire project.
      And maybe the rip it out, and it turns out one of their large clients (or a large amount of the user base) was relying on it.

      Addressing technical debt is always hard to justify, but it always makes a better project.
      If management doesn’t care about a better project, they will prioritise features and things that make money

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