I can see how MS is screwed up from the pieces of their code that are open, which can be extrapolated to the pieces of code that are closed.
Unfortunately Adobe follows their path now, and even trying to beat MS in producing bloated code. Photoshop, Dreamweaver and even Acrobat Reader will soon become unmaintainable monsters. Otherwise, how can one explain that a dozen of unimpressive new features in the new version makes the package twice as bigger?
Bloat is different from complete (or "feature-full"). Bloat means very long installation processes (Microsoft is the champion here), long startup times, slow software, huge memory requirements, crashes, etc.
When you install a typical, cheap consumer device under Windows (anything: a printer, a joystick, etc.) from the vendor's CD-ROM it usually installs megabytes of bullshit, including automatically-started craplets with shiny but useless owner-drawn GUIs, etc. This is bloat. When I plug-in some USB stuff in my OpenBSD laptop, the kernel spits a few lines on the console to tell it has recognized the device and that's all.
edit: the last releases of Acrobat Reader, huge, very slow and buggy are a very good example of bloat.
Can you come up with a product that is complete (100% can serve everybody needs in the universe) but not bloat?
Can you come up with a product that starts faster, install faster, requires less memory requirements, and don't crash as much as MS Words but also provides the same amount of features comparable to MS Words?
When I plug my iPod to my Ubuntu version 6.06, Ubuntu crashed my iPod without any informative feedback. When I dmesg-ed, I saw some hex number and some usbX where X is a number.
Unfortunately Adobe follows their path now, and even trying to beat MS in producing bloated code. Photoshop, Dreamweaver and even Acrobat Reader will soon become unmaintainable monsters. Otherwise, how can one explain that a dozen of unimpressive new features in the new version makes the package twice as bigger?