>> Microsoft are not going to employ 50 people for a few months to go 
>> through and optimise for RAM usage just to make you feel better.
>
> Indeed no - their job is to research new techniques for slowing software 
> down as much as possible to boost sales of expensive new hardware. 
> (Presumably this is why the hardware vendors love them so much...)

There job is to make money for the company.  50 people writing Word 2010 
will make more money than 50 people optimising Word 2003.  They can't help 
it, it's all the customers that would prefer paying for a buggy and memory 
hungry Word 2010 compared to a lean and mean Word 2003.

If you want to change soemthing, you need to convince the majority of 
computer users NOT to buy the latest software for MS...  Good luck.

> Now I'm puzzled - when I bought 1 GB of RAM for my PC, I had to pay 
> several hundred pounds for it... Am I living in an alternate reality or 
> something?

You're living in the past :-)  Price of computer stuff goes down pretty 
quickly - it's always surprising if you haven't looked for a while.  I 
bought a 64MB memory stick for £40 a few years back - now I was surprised 
that a 1GB one is under £10.

>>> I mean, 20 *years* ago computers could do that instanteneously with a 
>>> fraction of the RAM and CPU power. Why are we not coding like that any 
>>> more??
>>
>> Because we (well, most of us) have better computers than we did 20 years 
>> ago?
>
> And that's just it, isn't it?
>
> Why bother fixing the problem when you can just throw more hardware at it.

I think it's more the case of the software writers taking advantage of the 
hardware improvements.  If MS were still only offering an uber-streamlined 
version of some old Win NT to run on our 3 GHz dual-core machines, I think 
Linux and MacOS would be doing pretty well :-)

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