The statement in question is in my last piece about the Ubuntu release cycle versus hardware requirements (longevity) as opposed to let just say Microsoft release cycle versus hardware requirements (longevity) and my comment was...
some other OS products seem more like they are out to consume the current installed hardware capabilities of average user
The only reason I am bring this up is because there is an excellent article at InfoWorld about this which gives a Windows OS/Windows Office comparison from 1999 to the present. It is really well written because the author references the average hardware base at each part of the evolution, talks a little on how service packs affected everything, and how much more powerful PCs became as the years passed by. He even has an abbreviation for for the phenomenon (some people just call it bloat) The Great
Moore's Law Compensator (TGMLC).
Despite years of real-world experience with both sides of the duopoly, few organizations have taken the time to directly quantify what my colleagues and I at Intel used to call The Great Moore's Law Compensator (TGMLC). In fact, the hard numbers above represent what is perhaps the first-ever attempt to accurately measure the evolution of the Windows/Office platform in terms of real-world hardware system requirements and resource consumption. In this article I hope to further quantify the impact of TGMLC and to track its effects across four distinct generations of Microsoft's desktop computing software stack.
This of course all begs the question but with evolving hardware aren't things really happening faster than they use too???
The net result is that, surprise, Vista and Office 2007 on today’s state-of-the-art hardware delivers throughput that's still only 22 percent slower than Windows XP and Office 2003 on the previous generation of state-of-the-art hardware. In other words, the hardware gets faster, the code base gets fatter, and the user experience, as measured in terms of application response times and overall execution throughput, remains relatively intact. The Great Moore's Law Compensator is vindicated.
The whole article is available at InfoWeek and is called
Fat, fatter, fattest: Microsoft. So once again more of the
do less with more type of thinking continues to rule in Redmond but then again there seems to an actual sort of kinda scientific principle in play here as well...
The Great Moore's Law Compensator (TGMLC).
