And those products really did help. Microsoft's implementation of malloc performed terribly for many workloads - dropping in a 3rd party allocator could speed u

And those products really did help. Microsoft's implementation of malloc performed terribly for many workloads - dropping in a 3rd party allocator could speed up your software considerably. It wasn't until well into the 2000s until the standard allocators started to become good enough to make the 3rd party libraries less essential. Many of them you can still buy today and they probably still help with certain types of software.