No one thinks the performance problems are implausible. But hardware can only do so much to make up for the worst excesses of antivirus. Behavioral scanning doesn't require huge amounts of memory and has negligible need to touch the hard drive. On-access scanning by definition barely needs to increase the number of I/O operations. It shouldn't bottleneck the machine if it's done competently. So then you're just loading outlook off a hard drive, which took several seconds the last time I tried it.

I probably have experienced something close to this. You're right; it doesn't take many steps to make a modern machine slow.

Reading the article was indeed surprising and depressing - it certainly is a plausible scenario! The question is: is such a disfigured desktop experience an acceptable result, given that the physical hardware enables much, much more productivity?

When NASA switched from internal IT to a third-party contractor, their laptops and desktops got replaced with worse hardware that somehow cost more. This is the Republican way.