But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not. At any given point, old applications are faster and current applications ar

But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not. At any given point, old applications are faster and current applications are slow, slowness being unevenly distributed: if you can pay extra for bigger memory and CPU, you get to use the fast lane. Also consider that companies balance a number of factors: costs for themselves, time to market, features, what the competition offers. New, more powerful hardware is an opportunity for them to make sloppy software cheaper and first to launch.