I’m far from a computer geek and I couldn’t write a line of code if my life depended on it. But I’m told all MS stuff is so bloated that they’ll never get the programs out from under in our lifetimes.
In industry, I’ve seen manufacturing systems designed with such a degree of complexity and redundancy that they can do nothing well.
I’ve designed enough stuff in my life to know simplicity is ALWAYS the best design criterion.
And simple don’t describe MS stuff. Sooner or later someone will come along with simple, clean programs that do the same things their stuff does.
Simplicity is not necessarily the best design criterion in software development. Modularity, rather, is what’s best. You want to start small and allow the user a great degree of customizability, minimizing the degree of bloat.
There is no such thing as a piece of software so large it cannot be rewritten from the ground up. It happens often enough, and Windows was recently rewritten. The problem with operating systems (this happens with all of them again) is that if you make it too “simple,” people will complain that they need to install all these additional modules or programs to get it to do what they want it to do. If it contains all of that, inevitably some of it will be memory-resident, including some things you don’t need or want.
There’s really no win-win for software developers. I’m more of an open-source guy myself. If you’re interested in doing a quick comparison of simple vs. complex, try the Google Chrome browser. It’s designed to be a simple web browser, in contrast with the others available.