I've read somewhere: When people move to their work, they have a fixed time budget, not a fixed distance budget. If they have access to faster transport, they

I've read somewhere: When people move to their work, they have a fixed time budget, not a fixed distance budget. If they have access to faster transport, they just find jobs further from home. Software efficiency seems the same: People have some fixed tolerance of time and buggyness for a task. When hardware gets faster and more stable, people just tolerate more bloat and bugs. Companies only fix this when complaints get bad enough, so the incentive to do better just disappears. This sort of fixed ratio while the tech below changes is everywhere. My original PC had a 200mb hard disk, and win31 took 20mb, so 10%. . My work laptop has a 512GB SSD, and Win10 took about 50GB, also 10% . Win31 was heavily optimized to fit in RAM and disk, Win10 is a bloated slug. It will stay a bloated slug until some shortage or whatever causes Microsoft to clean up its mess. This already happened e.g. with the EEE Pc that couldn't run Win Vista. So they kept XP alive and optimized Win7 some more. Enterprise has the same limits. A company had a mainframe with 1Mb RAM. End of year batches ran in about 3 days because they had to. Today 5 decades later, the COBOL code has more than 10 000 times as much RAM, and still end of year closure takes 2 or 3 days. If it would be slower, they'd optimize or they can't fulfill obligations. But faster makes no sence, they are closed at end of year for 3 days. So optimization happens when requirements force it, and bloat happens when it gets a chance to grow unchecked. All of this is also why we should not worry too much about governement forcing companies to become more eco or repair friendly. The company will scream it is impossible, and when forced it will remove some bloat and carry on.