It's not just consumer software and not just the last 20 years.

There is an axiom that software gets bigger, for no particularly good reason, for at least 40 years.

This can be witnessed in how the size of /bin/true on Unix went from 0 bytes to whatever size it is today [1]. I can't find it now, but there was an article with a bar chart showing a gradual progression through time.

Of course, on-disk size doesn't translate directly to performance, but the trivial example demonstrates mechanisms by which bloat/cruft can accumulate so gradually that no outcry is ever caused.

It also refutes the sibling/downthread comment the "cruft" is (necessarily) someone else's use case.

[1] e.g. 13k MacOS native, 52k GNU coreutils from MacPorts

> There is an axiom that software gets bigger, for no particularly good reason, for at least 40 years.

Sounds like a computer variant of Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion."

Close, but not quite, since what's available (space in the specific example) isn't being filled.

Alternatively, with the complaint that desktop software feels more sluggish on a modern computer than contemporaneous software did on much older hardware suggests that something is even being overfilled.

My intuition says there's a different phenomenon of psychology at work here.

Not experienced a sluggish word processor recently (using 6 yr old lenovo laptop, both Word and OpenOffice are fine)

Word 2016 takes 2 seconds to start on my pretty beefy notebook (2017 Lenovo X1 Yoga). Pretty sure that when you measure it, Word 2003 or so would take a similar amount of time to start on a 2003 PC, even though all of CPU, RAM and disk storage are vastly faster nowadays.

Why does the Word window not appear within milliseconds of me clicking on the application icon?

Because that word processor can do a lot more things and is not the sole thing running on a modern machine.

and, one would imagine, a lot of accumulated cruft.

what you're calling cruft is some other person's usecase.

I'd still prioritize the basic use case of comfortably typing words, which to my admittedly sensitive mind is not supported that well anymore by some common pieces of software. Between the apparent round-trip per keypress in Outlook Web, the noticeable general display delay of Windows 10, and the frequent wait for characters to appear in a reasonably small Powerpoint presentation, I feel like I might be holding it wrong.

Quite often it would not be usecases, but externalities. That is, trading the quality and efficiency of your product for some benefits in selling or developing.

Software, for better or worse, is a social enterprise, so you can get away with dumping a lot on your users before they pack up and look for alternatives.

Ok, and a lot of non-user-facing cruft too.