For all the ESG virtue signaling that Microsoft does, you’d think they’d be concerned about the climate impact of this and why their applications are so inefficient.
It's funny that they give you a whole Greenpeace lecture in the Settings app now about carbon footprint and how Microsoft is committed to lowering it and that you're a terrible person for having your brightness at 100%, but then spins around on this and shoves Office in boot...
The point of the virtue signaling is that it’s cheaper than actual virtue while retaining much of the same benefit. Practicing virtue signaling and not virtue is pretty natural.
There's an old quote about "why would I pay to have the code written more efficiently when processors are constantly getting faster and harddrives are constantly getting bigger?" that always comes to mind about MS software. I don't know the validity of that quote to be any more accurate than the 640k memory one, but it always just had the feel of authenticity by everything you see as circumstantial evidence
It feels like they’ve always taken the approach: “Why rewrite anything when we can just add more virtualization?” In the short term, that might help ensure compatibility with older versions with minimal testing. But after 40-something years, it’s clear that it’s become a mountain of technical debt—one that Microsoft has no real plans to tackle any time soon.
The underlying issue is MS software is running on customer machines so it’s not part of their bottom line. They have little incentive to care as long as it’s not so slow their monopoly breaks.
Additionally, I suspect there's 4 decades of legacy backward compatibility hacks that doing anything intelligent to help UX is impossible. It might break some peanut butter factory in Indiana that is paying for support.
They don't care about the climate impact. They care about the green washing PR. Probably decided that the cost of fixing this outweighs the potential PR benefit.
